For the most part,
the distinction between adolescence and adulthood is a matter of cultural
expectations and restrictions rather than a matter of intrinsic psychological
characteristics ... Adolescence may best be construed as the first phase of
adulthood.

-David Moshman,Adolescent
Development: Rationality, Morality, and

Identity,
1999

Weird behavior is
natural in smart children.

-Hunter S. Thompson, JD, Kingdom of Fear, 2003

Chapter
2 is where standard texts take up “adolescent development,” depicting it as a
time of body- and mind-shattering transformation. Hormones erupt, breasts
sprout, fluids flow, peers rule, music throbs, sarcasm and moodiness take over.
The sweetest children abruptly metamorphose into brain-damaged parent-hating
monsters, careening daddy’s Jetta at 100 miles per hour trailed by littered
wine-coolers, transforming school hallways into geek-torturing bully fests,
hauling babies under one arm (the boys) and Uzis under the other (girls).
That’s the normal teens; “at risk”
kids are really messed up.

The
good news is that suddenly, on their 21st birthday, teen lunatics suddenly
revert to amiable, tasteful, taxpaying adults, except for fraternity boys.

American
adults do not like adolescents. Studies by University of Oklahoma Health
Sciences professors Robert Hill and J. Dennis Fortenberry (1999) reported that
“adults perceive adolescents in largely negative ways, and these negative
images are consistent among a wide social spectrum.” They found more than half
of the adults they surveyed held negative views of teenagers, three to four
times more than held positive views, while one-third viewed teens neutrally.

My
own study of University of Oklahoma public health graduate students (average
age 34 and largely politically moderate or conservative) and University of
California, Santa Cruz, undergraduates (average age 23 and overwhelmingly
liberal) in 1993 found similar results. Both sets of adults across the age and
political continuum were overwhelmingly likely to endorse negative stereotypes
of teenagers and even the most extreme estimates of teenage mental illness,
drug use, suicide, and sexual behavior. In a particularly telling example of
anti-youth prejudice, respondents were more likely to rate an unplanned
pregnancy among a couple consisting of two 17 year-olds as the result of
immaturity, while an identically-described unplanned pregnancy among two 24
year-olds was largely attributed to mere bad luck that “could happen to anyone.”

Adults
are not neutral observers, not objective weighers of fact, any more than, say,
male medical researchers can be presumed objective about women. The difference
is that while biases against other groups based on race, gender, religion, or
homosexual orientation are at least treated with the veneer of disapproval,
adult biases against adolescents typically are ignored or are praised as
insight and “realism.”

The
bias of adults against adolescents infects research findings, as well as
institutional and media commentary, on youth. The dislike of youth is reflected
in both the attitudes of many social science theorists and the choice of the
media and political authorities to feature those with the most negative views.
As noted, Northwestern University psychiatrist Daniel Offer studied medical and
psychological researchers and found a large majority vastly overestimate the
degree of pathology among teenagers based on the primitive biases introduced by
generalizing doctors’ and therapists’ contact with diseased, clinically
disturbed teens to the entire teenage population.

The
American public is equally hostile. In 1997, the Washington polling group
Public Agenda announced--as if this were something new and startling--that
two-thirds of adults thought “kids these days” typically are “rude,
irresponsible, and wild” and portend a bleak future. This poll was actually
quite funny, revealing a large majority of American adults accusing a large
majority of their peers of raising rotten kids! (Interestingly, teenagers did
not return the hostility--70% preferred to judge adults on their individual
merits rather than blanket stereotypes, a much more cognitively complex
attitude.)

“I
have often believed that part of the underlying dislike that Americans have
towards their young is due to the tremendous fear they have of getting old,”
Offer observed. The view of adolescence as an extreme, wrenching, miserable
time of life is surprisingly widespread among Americans. The New York Times’ science editor Barbara
Stauch’s best-selling The Primal Teen
(2003) argues that the push-pull of brain development--in which childhood
processes mature into adult ones--accounts for teenagers “radical mood swings”
and irrational behaviors. Color-coded brain scans are deployed by neurobiologist
Richard Restak in The Secret Life of the
Brain (2001) to argue that teen brains process information in more
primitive ways than adults--which is why, he argues, all teens are “difficult,”
“unpredictable,” “moody,” suffering “biological tumult,” “impulsiveness,” and
“disregard for consequences,” and adults, representing “the culmination of
human brain development,” are “mature,” “likable,” and “courteous.”

The
narrow-minded brain arguments are becoming more extreme. Dr. Jay Giedd of the
National Institute of Mental Health argues in the March 2005 National Geographic that “brain anatomy”
justifies stripping away the rights of persons under age 25. (Of course, he
doesn’t mention more compelling studies, such as in Nature, June 2004, showing adult brains deteriorate rapidly,
producing significant learning and memory impairment by age 40.) In the 2005
blowup over 16 year-old drivers, psychologist Marvin Zuckerman accused teens of
rampant “sensation seeking” involving an innate desire to take risks and act
impulsively to argue for banning driving until age 21.

This
“biological determinism” (the argument that the supposedly unique biological
characteristics of one’s race, gender, or age invariably determine one’s
behavior) is simply a theory. It does not result from empirical (that is,
real-world) tests comparing behaviors of groups judged biologically different
to determine whether the average teenager behaves in ways significantly
different than the average adult in ways the theory would predict. Biological
determinists also do not factor out variables such as socioeconomic status,
which (as will be shown in Chapters 6-9) has a profound effect on what are
typically referred to as “teenage risks,” especially traffic crashes, firearms
assaults, pregnancy, and crime.

The
problem with biological determinist theories is that teens and adults do not
behave in the real world in ways that they predict. If biology determined
teenage behavior, teens would act like other teens and very differently from
adults. This is not the case, as later chapters will detail. Teens behave very
much like the adults around them, and very unlike teens of societies not around
them. For example, you can predict the birth rate for teenage mothers with 90%
accuracy if you know the birth rate of adult mothers of their culture and the
culture’s poverty rate; you can predict nothing about one culture’s teen birth
rate from the teen birth rate of another culture. The same adult-teen
correspondence is found for homicide, violent death, criminal arrest, suicide,
HIV infection, drinking, heavy drinking, drug use, smoking, obesity, and other
key behaviors. If teenage brains functioned in fundamentally different ways
than adult brains, these close adult-teen parallels would not occur.

Nor
have practical tests of cognitive development and problem-solving exercises
administered to teens and adults shown distinct divergences in thinking.
Perhaps the best summary of these is by the University of Nebraska’s David
Moshman, in his 1999 text, Adolescent Development:
Rationality, Morality, and Identity:

Development does
continue over the course of adolescence and early adulthood, and many
individuals construct concepts and forms of reasoning that go far beyond the
competencies they had in early adolescence. I am not aware, however, of any for
or level of knowledge or reasoning that is routine among adults but rarely seen
in adolescents. On the contrary, there is enormous cognitive variability among
individuals beyond age 12, and it appears that age accounts for surprisingly
little of this variability. Adolescents often fail to adequately test and
revise their theoretical understandings, but adults fail in the same ways.
Adolescents often show simplistic conceptions of knowledge and primitive forms
of social and moral reasoning, but so do adults. Adolescent reasoning is
frequently biased. but so is that of adults... Adolescents, it may be argued,
are still developing, but the sorts of developmental trends seen in adolescence
typically extend well into adulthood (p. 118).

The difference arises from the fact (also noted in
my 1993 survey) that the same behaviors are interpreted very differently if
committed by adolescents than if committed by adults. For example, studies by
Offer and colleagues indicate that physicians and mental health professionals
are much more likely to attribute adolescent behaviors to “developmental age”
and identical adult behaviors to individual proclivities. This, put simply, is
prejudice.

Similarly,
a 2005 study by physicians at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital of cancer
patients ages 10 to 19 who were participating in complex, wrenching decisions
involving their own deaths found:

These children and
adolescents with advanced cancer realized that they were involved in an
end-of-life decision, understood the consequences of their decision, and were
capable of participating in a complex decision process involving risks to
themselves and others. The decision factors most frequently reported by
patients were relationship based...The factors that were most frequently
identified included the following: for patients, caring about others (n = 19
patients); for parents, the child's preferences (n = 18 parents).

Contrary to those who view teens as incompetent,
narcissistic, and unable to make far-reaching decisions, the St. Jude
researchers found the young patients clearly understood that they would die and
were concerned primarily for how their decision would affect other people
(overwhelmingly, their parents), even when that concern came at their own
personal cost. “This finding is contrary to existing developmental theories,”
the research team reported dryly (Hinds et al, 2005, abstract). Indeed, just
about any time “developmental theories” and claims of teenage brain deficiency
are empirically tested, youths are found to be far more competent than the
theorists claim--in fact, as competent as adults.

Are
teens, then, exactly like adults in every respect? The answer is “yes,” in that
adolescents’ individual (in-group) variations far exceed the general variation
between teenagers and adults (between-group variation). The answer is “no,” in
that there are some general differences between teens and adults--but they are
not the sort that can be classified as gradations of maturity. For example, teenagers
are more likely than adults to die in accidents involving transportation, water
sports, and firearms, as well as homicide, an age-based vulnerability that is
often cited as proof of their immaturity. What is not cited is that adults are
more likely to die from drug abuse, falls, and most other types of accidents,
as well as from suicide--does this mean adults are more at risk?

Often
adolescent risk is exaggerated by commentators who state that accidents,
suicide, and homicide are the leading causes of deaths for young people. This
is true, but only because teens are far less likely than adults to die from
heart disease, cancer, and strokes. Taken as a whole, in fact, adolescence is
one of the safest times of life, with death rates considerably lower than for
any adult age group, as the table on the next page shows.

Not
only are teens age 15-19 less than one-third as likely to die as their parents
(say, age 40-44), teens are safer even
from violent death than every adult age group. Teens age 15-19 are safer
from accidents and suicides than any
adult age group and have a risk of homicide equivalent to 30 year-olds. Younger
teens ages 10-14 are safer still--in fact, younger teens enjoy the lowest overall risk of death of any age
group, including the second lowest risk of violent death (only age 5-9 is
safer, slightly).

Note
that deaths among persons ages 15-34 are more likely to be from violent causes.
Two-thirds of the deaths among teens are from violent, not natural, mishaps,
leading to the oft-repeated statement that accidents, homicide, and suicide are
the leading causes of deaths in adolescence. But this is not because teens have
a high rate of violent death; in
fact, risk of dying by violence rises after age 20, as do natural deaths. While
adolescents are depicted as in dire peril of dying in careless accidents, or by
suicide or murder, the violent death rate for older teens (age 15-19) is
actually 30% lower than for adults of age to be their parents (say, 45-49),
while the violent death rate for younger teens (age 10-14) is just one-eighth that of their parents.

Deaths per
100,000 population by age group and type, California, 2003

AgeAll deathsNaturalViolentSuicideHomicideAccident/other

0-4153.9142.911.00.02.18.9

5-940.534.16.40.00.85.6

10-1426.818.78.10.51.26.5

15-1966.220.945.25.014.325.9

20-2492.225.267.010.221.235.7

25-2983.730.952.89.915.127.8

30-3492.645.447.211.49.925.9

35-39135.583.652.011.18.432.4

40-44206.9147.159.813.37.039.6

45-49320.0256.863.213.75.244.2

50-54476.2412.863.416.24.143.1

55-59669.4615.254.214.33.436.6

60-641,017.5966.551.112.23.035.9

65-691,546.11,492.653.512.73.237.6

70-742,413.92,355.358.612.71.644.3

75-793,845.53,759.885.717.52.665.6

80-846,249.96,130.4119.526.31.292.1

85+11,966.711,787.6179.120.22.2156.7

Total674.3625.348.99.67.032.3

Note: Natural deaths are those
from disease or the aging process. Violent deaths (broken down separately) are
from suicide, homicide, and accident (including external causes of undetermined
intent).

Nor,
as we will see in Chapter 3, has danger to adolescents risen. In fact,
adolescents today are much less likely to die from both natural and violent
causes today than 30 years ago (see discussion of Carnegie Council report
below).

It is
not correct to depict adolescent years as a time of high risk, nor to claim
today’s teens face unheard-of dangers. Further, adolescent risk of both natural
and violent death varies widely by socioeconomic status, suggesting the
phenomenon is not age-based so much as environmental in nature.

Another
example of age-based differences: adolescents are more likely than adults to be
arrested for public crimes, such as robbery, property crimes such as burglary
and shoplifting, arson, and other offenses that occur outside the home.
However, adults are more likely to be arrested for private crimes: domestic
violence, drunken driving, credit-card and check forgeries, and white-collar
offenses such as embezzlement and corporate frauds. (Interestingly, the most
policed offense, homicide, shows equivalent rates of adolescent and adult
arrest.)

The
result is that adolescents display a higher overall arrest rate, leading
primitive criminologists to declare teenagers innately crime-prone. However,
this discrepancy may result from the simple fact that public offenses are more
likely to result in arrest than private ones--street violence is more policed
than domestic violence, robbery more than securities fraud. The different
environments and social statuses adolescents and adults occupy as a result of
their ages influence their patterns of crime and arrests--not the age
difference itself. Finally, once again, poorer teens are far more likely to be
arrested than middle-aged and affluent ones, due both to higher crime rates and
biases in policing. That social scientists should make such a fundamental
mistake of equating higher arrest rates with natural-born criminality is
inexcusable.

“Researchers
have found adolescence an increasingly complex age range” (Moshman 2000, p 49).
Indeed it is, which makes the ubiquitous claims about “typical teenagers” found
in the media and among social scientists absurd. There are “typical
stereotypes” of teenagers invented by adults (and internalized by some youths),
all negative, but there is no such thing
as a typical teenager.

Stages of
development: Physical

We
all went through it; the physical stages of adolescence do not require detailed
description. Height and weight gain, breasts, voice changes, facial hair, pubic
hair, menstruation, ejaculation, all occur with respect to their genders around
ages 11-14. The most striking aspect of adolescent development are (a) the
reaction to them, and (b) they occur at earlier ages today.

Americans
seem to have severe difficulty with the idea that children and teenagers are
sexual beings. The illusion of “children’s innocence” dominates American
thinking, with strange and contradictory results: teens are simultaneously
misdepicted as hormonal sex maniacs and innocent ingenues, both eliciting their
own brand of shock. Adults and popular media sources depict sexual development
as excruciatingly humiliating for young teenagers, then publicly highlight teen
sexuality in highly personal ways--scantily clothed child fashion models,
seventh-graders dragged on to talk shows to for hosts and audiences to berate
for sexual precocity, public discussions by political candidates of their teen
daughters’ sexuality, porn sites advertising teen debauchery, and incessant,
explicit surveys and mainstream press exposes on “teenage sex.”

Yes,
kids do grow up faster today--and it’s a good thing. The age of puberty--female
menarche (first menstrual period) has been most actively measured--has dropped
from around age 17 in 1800 at a rate of three months per decade, to around 12.5
today. Boys spermarche (first ejaculation) occurs about six months later than
girls’ menarche (13 today, on average). The ability to reliably get pregnant
and impregnate arrives about a year after the “arche”. Why doesn’t
great-grandmother remember 13 year-old mothers back in her day? Not so much
because of greater chastity, but because they COULDN’T get pregnant back then.

If
we were able to travel two centuries back in time, we would see 17 year-olds in
early America that resembled, physically and intellectually, 13 year-olds of
today. Most 17 year-olds of 1803 would be smaller in size, flat-chested, and
more childlike in every respect than 17 year-olds of 2003. It is something of a
surprise to learn that Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were around
14--their conversations, play, and preoccupations seemed more attuned to what a
10- or 11-year-old would find interesting now. (In the later Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective, however, Twain
matures teenage Tom remarkably into a super-adult.)

Abigail
van Buren and other commentators lament that the downward trend in puberty is a
“cruel trick of nature” that, thankfully, appears to be leveling off. In fact,
the falling age of puberty is nature’s reward to societies that can feed their
children adequately, since the age of sexual reproduction is directly related
to body weight. It shortens the period of dependent childhood, a burden on
societies, and accelerates the arrival of productive adulthood. In fact, it is
American society’s “cruel trick” that insists on juvenilizing adolescents
rather than developing pathways to incorporate increasingly mature teenagers
into adult culture, responsibility, and opportunity.

Early views of
adolescent development

Historian
Joseph Kett pointed out in Adolescence in
America the unscientific nature of American scientists theories about
teenagers:

To speak of the
“invention of the adolescent” rather than of the discovery of adolescence
underscores... (that) adolescence was essentially a conception of behavior
imposed on youth rather than an empirical assessment of the way in which young
people actually behaved... A biological process of maturation became the basis
of the social definition of an entire age group (1977, pp.215, 243).

In fact, prejudice and anxiety concerning the fact
that adolescence itself is defined by puberty--that is, s-e-x--has led to
extraordinarily irrational notions of adolescence. Adolescence is defined as a
high risk period of life due largely to the traditional myth that transition
from childhood “innocence” to adult sexuality (like Adam and Eve’s fall from
grace in the Old Testament) must
entail great debilitation and corruption. Americans seem unable to get beyond
fearful, negative stereotypes of the second decade of life.

Psychologist
G. Stanley Hall is credited with pioneering the study of teenage years as a
distinct time of life, delineated in his 1904 volume Adolescence. His depiction invoked outgrowths of Darwinian
biogenetic notions, including the disputed theory of recapitulation. Recapitulation holds that the development of each
human individual mirrors the development of humans as a species, so that
infants are similar to prehistoric humans, children to more advanced anthropoids,
and adolescents as a transitional evolutionary stage to the modern humans
represented by adults--perhaps the bumbling, hypersexed Pleistocenes depicted
in Quest for Fire.

Hall
had an unhappy boyhood, suffering abuses from a brutal father, intense shame
over sexuality, enshacklement in anti-masturbation devices, and a humiliating
diagnosis of unfitness for military service. These experiences may have
contributed to his dire view of adolescence and, like Teddy Roosevelt (also a
sickly boy turned macho advocate of war and rugged manhood) Hall pushed for the
strong discipline of military service and regimented industrial schools to
control and shape boys:

The momentum of
heredity often seems insufficient to enable the child to achieve this great
revolution and come to complete maturity, so that every step of the upward way
is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals. There is not only arrest,
but perversion, at every stage, and hoodlumism, juvenile crime, and secret
vice... Home, school, church fail to recognize its nature and needs and,
perhaps most of all, its perils (p. xiv).

Thomas Hine’s history, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, is apt: Hall extended
even the meager research farther than warranted, included studies of adults,
and displayed that combination of fear, envy, and sexual attraction toward
teens that characterizes the most bizarre works. “This volatile mix of ideas and
emotions was present at the creation of the modern adolescent,” Hine opined
(1999, p 159), “and it haunts us all, young and old, still.”

Unified human
evolutionary/racial/developmental hierarchy

(ontogeny <->phylogeny), c1900*

Anglo-Saxon
mature male adult

Modern humanCaucasian
(other) Young adult, women

Primitive human“Savage
races” Adolescent

Neanderthal“Childlike races”Infant/child

*assembled by author from rough
rankings in Hall (1904).

Hall’s recapitulation syntheses merged age, race,
and gender into a unified theory which classified nonwhite peoples as “adolescent
races”--that is, at a more primitive stage of human development than white
northern European men. “An undeveloped race, which is incapable of
self-government... is like an undeveloped child who is incapable of
self-government,” wrote another theorist.American Medicine, the
nation’s major medical journal, reported in 1907 that “the Negro...(displays)
instability of character incident to lack of self-control, especially in
connection with the sexual relation;” being “without brains” due to undeveloped
frontal brain lobes, the editors argued, blacks could not comprehend the
consequences of their actions and therefore did not deserve expanded rights
(see Gould 1981). Prevailing theories of crime during this period centered on phrenology--the belief that criminals
were atavistic throwbacks to primitive humans and could be recognized by skull
shape and body configurations--which predicted their anti-social behavior as an
inborn characteristic.

Another major medical theorist reported in an
1895 “state of the knowledge review” that “all psychologists who have studied
the intelligence of women...recognize today that they represent the most
inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and
savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy,
absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.” These 1900-era
declarations by leading scientists of black and female inferiority are
resurrected by today’s biodeterminists virtually verbatim to describe adolescent
inferiority.

Hall’s
and others’ biogenetics theories--“a kind of mystical Darwinism with a racist
tinge,” Hine wrote--caught fire because they fit perfectly into the politics of
an era in which the United States was making a transition to a major colonial
power, and great public concerns were being raised over immigration, civil
rights, and women’s suffrage. A major implication of their theories was that white
American women and children were the weak link in the white race’s superiority,
at constant risk of being seduced into regression by the depravities of
primitive, nonwhite and non-native races to which they were naturally drawn.
Nothing less than civilization itself depended on protecting white women and
children from the drugs, language, and morals of the Negro, Indian, Chinese,
Mexican, and other non-northern-European immigrants, leading scientists argued.

Like
other biological determinists then and now, Hall relied on anecdotes and
assertions rather than systematic effort to match his theories to real-world
behavior. As a result, later researchers had little trouble debunking his
drastic views. Despite “the widespread myth that every child is a changeling
who at puberty comes forth as a different personality,” psychologist Leta
Hollingworth wrote in The Psychology of
the Adolescent (1928), adolescent development is characterized by
“gradualness” and is governed more by social mores than by biology. As
researchers moved away from supposition and anecdote and began studying real
teenagers in real life, they “were struck by the absence of storm and stress
among young people in the communities which they studied” (Kett 1977, p. 259).

Anthropologist
Margaret Mead’s studies of numerous cultures found that Hall’s and traditional
notions of adolescence as an extreme period of sturm und drang (storm and stress) is unique to Western,
particularly American culture; adolescence in most cultures is not seen as
stormy or stressful. Though Mead’s work has been disputed (and defended), her
finding that “the stress is in (American) civilization, not in the physical
changes through which our children pass” has been amply validated. Literally
hundreds of studies over the following century found the vast majority of
adolescents did not find puberty a traumatic time, that changes were gradual,
that hormonal influences on behavior “though real and pervasive, account for
only a small part of the multiple changes that characterize adolescence”
(Feldman & Elliott 1993, p. 487), and that teen values tended to match those
of the adults around them (see Offer 1987). Nevertheless, new fields of popular
thinking and research would emerge after World War II seeking to define
teenagers as a very different, and not at all pleasant, sort of creature.

What is
“adolescent psychology”?

Sociologically,
youth often are depicted as a monolithic group that is different and separate
from adults, forming a separate and feared “youth culture.” Modern researchers
have failed to find such a singular culture. “The monolithic youth culture” is
a “myth,” human development professor Bradford Brown reported. “... For better
or for worse, adults and adult institutions do
intervene in teenage peer cultures” (Feldman & Elliott 1993, p. 195,
emphasis original).

Even
“antisocial peer groups,” assumed to be pivotal influences corrupting teens, do
not “redirect members’ behavior patterns but reinforce predispositions that
predated group membership,” Brown noted:

Serious delinquency, along with
heavy drug use, is concentrated in a small number of adolescent cliques and
crowds. Yet, although they make up a small proportion of the teenage
population, such antisocial peer groups are a matter of grave concern. In most
cases, however, it does not appear that they are composed of “all-American kids
turned bad by peer influence. Instead, aggressive children, who are readily
labeled as such and rejected by most of their peers, gravitate toward one
another and coalesce into cliques well before adolescence.

...Researchers have consistently
shown that similarity stems primarily not
from processes of peer influence but from adolescents’ inclination to choose
like-minded peers as friends and the tendency of peer groups to recruit as new
members individuals who already share the group’s normative attitudes and
behaviors (pp. 191, 193).

While “peer pressure” is universally depicted as
negative, Brown’s research found that “adolescents perceive more pressure
toward self-enhancing activities (school achievement, peer socializing) than
antisocial or self-destructive behavior” from their fellow teens. “In fact,
pressure to finish high school was the single strongest influence from friends
that respondents reported” (p. 194). Consistently, youths report little
pressure from their peers to drink, use drugs, smoke, or have sex.

As
we’ll see in Chapter 3, adults have striven to prevent a distinct youth culture
from arising even as every action they took to separate youths from adults,
from laws to get teens out of the labor force to the segregation of youths in
high school, ensured that distinct youth cultures would develop. By the 1950s,
the buying power of teenagers made it impossible to deny that many if not most
adolescents did have different tastes in music, language, dress, and
associations--that is, a separate, youth culture. In following decades, it
would become apparent that there were many youth cultures, so that today
fragmentation and niches are more accurate.

It
followed that underlying a distinct youth culture must lie a separate teenage
way of thinking--that is, an “adolescent psychology.” Hall provided the
academic basis, flawed as it was, for the belief that there was some
particular, separate psychological state that adhered to teenagers that was not
found in adults or children.

In
the 1950s, however, many theorists liked the traits associated with adolescents
and saw them as an antidote to the rising conformity of corporate culture.
“Juveniles deal with each other with a crudity unparalleled in later life,”
wrote sociologist Edgar Friedenburg in The
Vanishing Adolescent (1959) from his study of high schoolers. “It is not
altogether terrifying if one is a little savage oneself...”. “Adolescent
spontaneity frightens and enrages” adults, who find “something in adolescence
itself that both troubles and titillates” them (pp. 20, 115). Friedenburg also
delighted in adolescents’ capacity for self-parody, which adults often
dismissed as silliness. Friedenburg identified a major anxiety among American
adults that would intensify over the next 40 years: “fear of aging.” “It is no
paradox, certainly, that people who are determined to stay young should resent
people who actually are young.”In
short, “adult response to the way adolescents act seems often to be influenced
more by the adults’ own unconscious needs and tensions than by what the
adolescents are actually doing” (pp. 114, 116, 117).

However,
for most theorists there was and is a different, hidden psychology behind the
development of adolescent psychology--the desire of adults to distinguish
themselves from adolescents as much as the other way around. For, none of the
natural traits attributed by experts to adolescents turned out to be
flattering--in fact, “adolescent” defines a laundry list of undesirable
qualities no self-respecting adult would admit to having.

While
theorists demean adolescents as suffering from unusual tendencies toward
conformity, group pressure, criminal behavior, materialism, preoccupation with
outward appearance, psychic fragility, simplistic idealism, sullenness,
volatility, hyperness, rudeness, insensitivity, disregard for risks, apathy,
and similar flaws (many traits ascribed to teenagers are contradictory, and
none seem to be positive), no one has convincingly shown that adults are not
equally afflicted. There is so much variation between teenagers that literally
no psychological traits are unique to them.

No
matter; adolescent psychology has evolved into a strong academic discipline,
with distinct bodies of research, textbooks, university wings, and specialists,
even though, peculiarly, most multi-age studies find that in real life, adults
display the same psychosocial traits that teenagers do. Ignoring these, leading
theorists seem to regard adolescents as a tragic mistake of nature.
Psychologist David Elkind, for example, argues that two “cognitive distortions”
characterize adolescent “egocentric” thinking: the imaginary audience, and the
personal fable. Adolescents are unusually self-conscious because they believe
they are the focus of everyone’ else’s attention and are hypersensitive to
criticism from the imaginary audience, Elkind (1979) said. Teens, believing
everyone is observing and thinking about them, develop a personal fable
involving an inflated sense of importance accompanied by an exaggerated sense
of despair at any personal failing, which they presume is also the
preoccupation of others, he argued. Adolescents thus have difficulty
distinguishing the real from the unreal and may develop an exaggerated sense of
invulnerability or immortality, according to egocentric theory.

These
presumed traits of “adolescent egocentrism,” in effect, accuse teens of being
narcissistically delusional. Most of Elkind’s research used teens in clinical
treatment, hardly a typical population, or examination of adolescents’ diaries
for incriminating statements, hardly an objective procedure since comments that
support the researchers’ hypothesis can be selectively cited. Elkind did not
show that these traits are universal across cultures or that they are not also
found in adults--that is, that they are individual rather than age-based. In
particular, dozens of studies comparing adults and adolescents have found great
similarity in cognition between the age groups and great individual variation
with the groups. Several, cited below, shows that adults actually believe
themselves more invulnerable than
adolescents do, arguing against a uniquely deluded teenage mental state.
Nevertheless, Elkind’s theories still tend to be cited as fact in adolescent
psychology textbooks.

Taken at face value, then, theories that adolescents
suffer from exaggerated self-absorption and peer-preoccupation, obsession with
appearance and audience, and anxious sense of place in the world would explain
a lot of things about “youth culture.” Teens were not like adults, the theory went.
They spend vast sums maintaining style and vast hours before mirrors arranging
the presentation of self to fit the critical eyes of peer judgers. Their
dramatic “sooooooo happy/could just die!” mood swings, hyper-embarrassments,
and super-sensitivity to any critical remark or look could be managed by
careful attention to outward pose. Youths are rebellious and oppositional
toward adults--their desire to establish an adult identity rather than being
perceived as childlike, to affirm their new identity by peer approval, put
teens at opposition to adult values.

Delinquent acts during
adolescence are extremely common, even among individuals who were well-behaved
children and who will become law-abiding adults... Adolescents are not aspiring
to adult status -- they are contrasting
themselves with adults.They adopt
characteristic modes of clothing, hairstyles, speech, and behavior so that,
even though they are now the same size as adults, no one will have any trouble
telling them apart.If they truly
aspired to adult status they would not be spraying graffiti on overpasses,
going for joyrides in cars they do not own, or shoplifting nail polish from
drug stores.They would be doing boring
adult things, like figuring out their income tax or doing their laundry
(emphasis hers) (p. 471).

Harris won a prestigious American Psychological
Association award and vast publicity in the mid-1990s for a theory which begins
with crude, and long debunked, stereotypes of the supposed differences between
adolescents and adults that are of no more sophistication than prejudices
holding Jews to be money-hungry or blacks prone to steal watermelons. (And, as
is often the case, Harris was trying to rationalize a personal dilemma: why her
adopted daughter was so rotten.) It would be difficult to explain under her
theory, which holds that teens are socialized solely by their peers, why teens
and adults around them so closely share values and behaviors.

Nevertheless,
the dubious “teenager versus adult” notion has proven popular for decades, and
it follows from it that teens needed a separate culture that would assimilate
and assuage their separate, messed-up traits. These presumed traits of millions
of teenagers are ones that can be marketed to, as will be seen in Chapter
3--though not in the way many culture critics suppose.

Of
course, a separate, more benign explanation is that youth cultures arise
because, in a rapidly changing society, teens grow up in a very different world
than their parents did. In that light, youth cultures may be adaptive. However,
neither the public nor authorities have ever been inclined to view youth
culture (often spoken of as if it were a monolithic entity) benignly. The
confused fear about “youth culture” is reflected in the Carnegie Council on
Adolescent Development’s 1995 report, Great
Transitions:

Many parents see their teenagers
drifting into an amorphous, risky peer milieu, popularly termed "the youth
culture."This culture is heavily
materialistic and derived mainly from the adult world and the commercial
media.It has its own cultural heroes,
made up of rock and film stars and prominent athletes, and its own
preoccupations ‑‑ cars, clothes, being part of the crowd, being
physically attractive.As a result,
adolescents spend little time with their families. With more money of their
own, whether from earnings, an allowance, or illegal activity, adolescents do
not need to go home even for dinner;they can buy their meals at a fast‑food place.

Often parents become perplexed,
even angry, as they feel their authority weakened and their values challenged
(1995, pp. 29, 63).

The report by the Carnegie Council (comprised of
some the nation’s leading experts on adolescent development as well as
institutional and political luminaries) brims with alarming statements (“since
1960... the continuing decline in the health status of American adolescents is
deeply disturbing... the casualties are mounting”) that are patently absurd. As
seen in the figures, nearly all health risks--violent death, natural death, and
disease-- have declined sharply for teens over the last 30-40 years, especially
for the younger teens (age 10-14) Carnegie’s study concerned.

For
example, the violent death rate for American 10-14 year-olds declined sharply,
from 20 per 100,000 population in 1960 to 14 per 100,000 in 1995 (the year of
the Carnegie report) and to an all-time low (9) by 2002. The biggest decline
was in those types of deaths that involve personal risk taking (suicide and
self-inflicted

accidents), which dropped radically from 12 per 100,000 in 1960 to 6 per
100,000 in 1995, directly contradicting Carnegie’s claim that younger teens
were acting in riskier and deadlier ways.

But
admitting that teens actually are safer and healthier today than in the past
would wreck the report’s main thesis--that teens were being raised more by a
dangerous “youth culture” today than by parents and were therefore in more
danger. The Carnegie Council approach is typical of prominent institutional
reports on teenagers--though not, as we will see, of scientific studies.
Similarly, an analysis by the University of Minnesota’s Adolescent Health
Program of the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health (an ongoing
health and behavior survey of thousands of teenagers) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
(September 10, 1997) blamed the decline in parents’ time spent with kids over
the last 40 years and urged greater adult supervision of youths to prevent
“risky behavior.” However, the study’s detailed tables showed that teens who
smoked, took illegal drugs, drank alcohol, and contemplated suicide tended to
come from homes where parents did likewise. Adding in the fact that teens today
take fewer risks with their health than teens of the past might seem to suggest
that spending even less time with
parents would improve adolescent health still more.

The
latter is not a political acceptable conclusion, however, and the vast majority
of “teen risk” studies of the 1990s were uniform--to the point of being
verbatim--recounts of supposedly rising, dire risk to adolescents and demands
for more parental supervision and remedial programs. Right up to the present
day, the
conclusions about the risks teens face derive not from real analysis of trends,
but from theoretical biases about “adolescent psychology” and “youth culture.”

For
more scientific reviews of the body of research does not find a unique teenage
psychology or oppositional peer culture. “Taken as a whole,” reported an
extensive review by University of Michigan psychologist Joseph Adelson of the
standard stereotypes researchers have disproven, “adolescents are not in turmoil, not deeply disturbed, not
at the mercy of their impulses, not
resistant to parental values, not
politically active, and not
rebellious” (emphasis original). “Empirical tests have shown that adolescents
are no less rational than adults,” reported another. “...adolescents are
consistent in their reasoning and behavior... and no more biased in their
estimates of vulnerability to adverse health consequences than are their
parents.”

Northwestern
University psychiatrist Daniel Offer, the nation’s leading researcher on
adolescents, studied 30,000 teenagers and adults from the 1960s to the 1990s.
He and his colleagues found 85% to 90% of teens held attitudes and risk
perceptions similar to that of their parents, were not alienated, did think
about the future, were coping well with their lives, and did not display
psychological disturbances. “Decision making for adults is no different than
decision making among teenagers,” Offer reported in 1987 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Offer’s 1993 review of 150 recent studies in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
concluded that “the effects of pubertal hormones are neither potent nor
pervasive” on emotions.

In
another, 40-year longitudinal study of adult development of men (now in middle
age) first interviewed as adolescents in 1962, Offer and colleagues classified
development in three ways:

·Continuous
growth: teens progressed through adolescence in stable, smooth, and
self-assured fashion and experienced few traumas in school and with families or
friends.

·Surgent growth:
teens who progressed through adolescence in developmental surges rather than
continuously and who showed minor behavior problems, but who also experienced
few traumas.

·Mixed group:
teens who showed combinations of the above growth patterns and could not be
placed into any one category (2003, pp. 3-8).

Three-fifths on the teens studied fell into the
continuous or surgent categories, displaying “good coping and expressing the
core values of their families of origin” (2003, p. 3). In contrast, the
one-fifth classed as tumultuous were “more likely to come from disrupted or
disturbing backgrounds” such as divorced or abusive families” (p. 7). Rather
than finding adolescence an exceptional or changeling time of life, Offer and
other researchers found “relative stability of personality traits from
adolescence into early and middle adulthood” (p. 4). That is, stable teens
tended to remain stable in adulthood and to establish stable marriages and
lives, while troubled teens tended to repeat the behaviors of their troubled
families, in turn showing more marital and personal behavior problems as
adults.

A few adolescents
experience identity crises that are traumatic and totally preoccupying.
However... for most, identity formation proceeds in a very gradual, uneventful
way... For most people, adolescence is not a period of intense emotional
upheaval that brings with it an increased risk of adjustment difficulties,
although it has often been thought of in this way. In fact, the incidence of
serious psychological disturbance increases only slightly from childhood to
adolescence (by about 2 percent), at which time the rate is about the same as
it is in the adult population (1997).

Nonetheless,
lamented University of Michigan psychologist Joseph Adelson, a leading
researcher on adolescents, “a stubborn, fixed set of falsehoods” continues to
dominate discussion of adolescents. So many “continue to believe many of the
myths about adolescence,” Offer agreed in 1993, despite solid research
debunking them. Chief among these, as noted, are psychological and medical
researchers, Offer’s studies found.

The political
agenda in depictions of adolescents

Currently, Hall’s notions are
themselves being recapitulated in recent neurobiological theories. Despite the
vast range of theories of teens over time, teens themselves have not changed
much, indicating the unreal world in which much American theorizing about teens
take place. Nor is mistheorizing about teenagers accidental. A fascinating
five-decade University of Wisconsin-Madison study found that scientists
miraculously pronounce teenagers “capable and adultlike” when adolescents are
needed for wars and economic booms--and “immature and slow to develop” during
peacetime and economic recessions. The study, led by human development
professor Robert Enright, concluded:

Whether youth will be portrayed
as competent to assume adult roles, or a psychologically incapacitated to
warrant their exclusion from adult roles, will depend largely on the labor and
economic requirements of the society in which they live.

Theorists view the adolescent
very differently in wartime than in economic depressions... When youths’ labor
was needed, they were viewed as quite capable and adultlike.

When youth were not needed in
the work force, they were viewed as more immature and slow to develop by
psychological theorists.

Note that Enright is referring to theorists rather
than to practical studies of adolescent competence, the latter of which are
typically ignored during times in which the view of teenagers is manipulated to
depict them as incompetent. Enright further found that shifts in social
scientists’ views tended to match those of politicians as reflected in congressional
legislation:

There is a strong
correspondence between the ideas of adolescent psychology and the legislation
passed by the U.S. Congress... One cannot retreat from the implication that
such theories mask an ideological purpose... What are our current ideological
stereotypes of youth and what societal/economic conditions are we trying to aid
by holding such views?

The most striking recent example is the Vietnam War
era, in which hundreds of thousands of young people too young to legally vote
or drink alcohol in most states were sent to combat. In fact, half of the
55,000 American troops killed in Vietnam had reached only the “attained age”
(in quaint Pentagon terminology) of 20 or younger. During the 1970-75 period,
Congress and many states lowered the age of legal adulthood, including for
voting and in many cases for drinking, from 21 to 18, reflecting Enright’s
finding that maturity is ascribed to adolescents when society needs their labor
or soldiery.

Since
1975, states largely have dismantled the rights of adolescents (while retaining
their legal obligations) and imposed much harsher conditions, often equating 17
year-olds with 3 year-olds in legal status (see Chapter 9). As millions of
factory and other formerly stable, higher-status entry-level jobs have been
eliminated by automation and relocate to overseas sites in recent decades,
replaced by large zones of unemployment and temporary low-status service
economy jobs, the political status of adolescents has declined precipitously.
There has been no change in the capabilities of adolescents themselves, of
course; only a shift in adult society toward seeing teenage labor as unneeded,
and youth, therefore, as a control problem rather than a resource. As social
conditions have changed, political attitudes toward youth have changed as well,
and so have social scientists’--the most prominent of whom today are announcing
“new” discoveries that teenagers are incompetent, just as their colleagues of
past eras did when similar political and economic conditions required that
view.

Stages of
development: Cognitive and Moral

What,
then, does happen during adolescence? Stage theories developed by Freud and
refined by Swiss biologist Jean Piaget, psychiatrist Erik Erikson, psychologist
Lawrence Kohlberg, and numerous later researchers, argue that development
occurs sequentially, with vast individual variations. Where Freud postulated
five basic stages:

Concrete thinking (which Piaget called “first
order”) is direct, applying logic to solve real problems; formal thinking
(“second order”) is abstract, applying logic to analyze logic. For example,
unlike very young pre-operational thinkers, a concrete thinker typically
understands that a quart of water in a tall container is the same quantity as a
quart of water in a flat container, or that a pound of clay is the same whether
formed into a block or a roll.

In
a standard test of concrete thinking ability, subjects of various ages are
asked to evaluate which of the following sets of arguments is the most logical:

1.a. Elephants are bigger than
mice

b. Dogs are bigger than mice

c. Therefore, elephants are
bigger than dogs

2.a. Mice are bigger than dogs

b. Dogs are bigger than
elephants

c. Therefore, mice are bigger
than elephants

Fourth graders choose the first set of arguments as
the most logical because it is obviously true, even though argument 1(c) does
not follow from premises 1(a) and 1(b). No amount of supplemental explanation about
the difference between truth and logic is able to convince fourth graders that
their answers are based on the possession of outside information (that
elephants are bigger than dogs in fact) rather than the logic of the arguments
themselves. College students, on the other hand, typically choose the second
set of arguments, since its conclusion follows logically from its premises even
though both its premises and conclusion are factually false.

In
between are seventh graders, who typically split down the middle in choosing
whether the first or second argument is the most logical--that is, some reason
like fourth graders, some like college students. However, given a simple explanation that
truth and logic are distinct issues, seventh graders improve their answers to
the level college students display. This is a good example affirming
that adolescent thinking benefits significantly from education and
experience--that is, the acquisition of additional information--rather than
denial of information based on the assumption that their cognitive development
is insufficient to handle it (Moshman 1999).

Formal
operations employ more abstract ability to generate and test alternative
hypotheses to solve complex problems containing hidden assumptions. For
example, consider the following classic test of formal thinking, called the
“selection task.” Subjects are asked to examine four cards, below

| E || K ||
4 ||
7 |

and to test the following simple hypothesis: “If a
card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.”
The subject is asked to test this hypothesis by devising the most efficient
strategy--that is, the one that turns over the LEAST number of cards--necessary
to prove or disprove the hypothesis. Which card(s) should be turned over?

Test
showed that even given time to consider, most adolescents and adults employ an
inadequate verification strategy that seeks to find evidence to verify the
hypothesis (turning over the card E, or the cards E and 4), rather than the
most rigorous falsification strategy that seeks most efficiently to disprove it
(turning over cards E and 7--do you see why?). This and similar tests led
researchers to conclude that most adults do not employ mature formal
operational thinking.

Piaget’s
experiments led him to classify children and teens as follows:

Pre-Concrete
operationalFormal operational

Ageoperationalonsetmatureonsetmature

585%15%0%0%0%

1012523510

1323444159

16115541713

18115501519

Note that by age 13, almost all the cognitive
marbles have been acquired--three in four display operational thinking, and
one-fourth formal, mature thinking. Lesser maturation takes place, mostly within the stages, over the next
five years--by 18, two-thirds display operational, and one-third mature,
cognition.

Piaget’s
research led him to great confidence in the cognitive abilities of adolescents,
which he found in some ways slightly superior, and in other ways slightly
inferior, to that of adults he studied. The real problem with teenagers, he
argued in the 1950s, was that they are too unsure of themselves to use their
idealism to reform society--that is, teens are not rebellious enough.

Theorists
such as Lawrence Kohlberg delved even deeper into the practical manifestations
of mature thinking with “moral reasoning” studies. How, exactly, did child,
adolescent, and adult thinking translate into real-life choices? These require
not simply cognitive ability, but the skill to apply it to abstract situations.
The great individual variations make it more feasible to talk in terms of
levels, not stages:

LevelMoral reasoning governed by:

Preconventionalauthority,
self-interest, reward/punishment

Conventionalrules
to maintain social order

Principledabstract,
universal principles

At age 10, four-fifths test in the preconventional
range, falling to a little more than half by age 14 and one-fourth by 18. What
is most striking is the stability of conventional thinking--about 50% are at
this level by age 14, 80% by 18, with little improvement at older ages except
modest maturing within the conventional range. Very few adolescents or adults
(fewer than one in 10) test in the principled range, not an optimistic finding.
(For whatever reason, Kohlberg disappeared and is listed as a suicide.)

A
great deal of real-world research and simulations confirm practical cognitive
theories. “Minors aged 14 were found to demonstrate a level of competency
equivalent to that of adults” in standard cognitive measures, reported a
typical Child Development study.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers reviewed 100 studies and found
adolescents actually harbor FEWER delusions of invulnerability than adults do.
Likewise, University of California, San Francisco, psychologist Nancy Adler
studied adolescents (average age 15) and their parents (average age 41) and
found the two groups expressed very similar attitudes toward risk. Delusions of
invulnerability “are no more pronounced for adolescents than for adults,” she
concluded.

These
are typical findings in hundreds of studies. Affirmations of the cognitive
competence of adolescents--and even younger children, who lack the abstract
reasoning capabilities of teens and adults but can nevertheless apply rules to
reach adult-like conclusions--are standard in multi-age studies and research
reviews by psychologists such as the University of Nebraska’s Gary Melton and
the University of Virginia’s Lois Weithorn.

The
most impressive recent research as of this writing, a 2002 MacArthur
Foundation-sponsored study of hundreds of teens and adults led by Temple
University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, assessed whether juveniles are
competent to stand trial as adults. The study found:

·Overall competence:88% of young adults (age 18-24), 89% of 16-17 year-olds, 80% of 14-15
year-olds, and two-thirds of 11-13 year-olds were found to meet adult standards
of responsibility for criminal acts. Note that 12% of adults failed the
competency standard.

·Youths age 16-17 were as competent as adults when
tested for abilities in understanding of rights, reasoning, appreciation of
risk, future orientation (i.e., ability to anticipate consequences of acts),
compliance with authority, and resistance to peer influences.

·Youths ages 14-15 were found nearly as competent as
adults in all of these measures as well--20% versus 12% incompetence rate, on
average. Interestingly, 14-15 year-olds scored as high as adults on future
orientation--an area younger teens are incessantly berated for their failings.

·Youths age 11-13 were generally competent, though not
as much as older ages.

·Intelligence heavily impacts competence, regardless of
age--40% of those in the lowest IQ range (60-74) were incompetent, compared to
just 5% of those with IQs of 90 and above. Because IQ reflects accumulated
knowledge and experience, younger teens are at a natural disadvantage here.

·The most interesting age-based finding was that younger
teens are more trusting in authority than older teens and adults (and whites
are more trusting than nonwhites)--that is, youths and whites are more likely
to confess, be honest, and “trust the system.” Interestingly, the study authors
judge (correctly, in my estimation) that trust in the system evidences
incompetence! This, ironically, is a very damaging finding for the juvenile
justice system, which relies heavily on the willingness of youths to confess
their offenses (Grisso et al 2003).

Bottom
line:16-17 year-olds are as competent
as adults, flatly so, and in a few cases, superior. There is no reason not to
follow the rest of the Western and Latin world to permit youths age 16 and
older entry into adulthood. Younger teens are surprisingly competent, and where
they fail, it appears due more to inexperience
than to cognitive deficiency.

What
is the upshot of such stage research? The average 14 year-old is capable of
adult reasoning, and half are able to apply it situationally.The average 18 year-old, a bit more so, The
average 30 year-old, little improvement. Adolescents’ cognitive capabilities
are similar to those of adults, but teens lack experience in applying
principles. Whether the experience that comes with age improves moral reasoning
and its application to real-life situations depends on how it is perceived.
When placed in real-life situations, teenagers beginning around age 13, and
nearly all by age 16-17, display reasoning and behavior similar to that of
adults.

Even if
competent, are teens today miserable and alienated?

Many
of today's adults, especially institutional authorities, seem to want young
people to feel hopeless and self‑hating (see discussion of school problem
lists in Chapter 1). Institutions who treat adolescents for suicide, mental
disturbances, addiction, delinquency, and other afflictions have a financial
stake in depicting teens as uniquely troubled and have had no trouble selling
that dubious image to the media, as we shall see. Whether adults have a
psychological stake in imagining the next generation as inferior to their own,
and younger ages as a vexation to the old, is also an intriguing question.

For
example, a May 1998 poll by USA Today's
tabloid USA Weekend of a quarter‑million
teenagers in grades 6‑12 reaffirms how trapped the media are in their own
concocted image of the miserable '90s wastrel. The poll's questions and youths'
responses are as follows:

·“How much influence does each of the following have on
your life?”A LOT:parents, 70%;religion, 34%; teacher, 25%;girlfriend/boyfriend, 24%;other
kids, 21%;celebrities, 21%;TV shows, 8%;advertising, 4%.

Note that the eight most‑claimed teenage
traits are those of personal achievement while the four least‑claimed are
of dubious, and/or outside‑awarded, distinction.Boasting or not, kids are proud of
themselves.Even when the poll
deliberately tried to elicit negative responses, such as by the following
biased questions...

·“Two million teens suffer from severe depression,
according to one estimate.Do you ever
feel really depressed?”

·“Have any of your friends ever tried to commit suicide,
or discussed it?”

... only 16% of the youths reporting feeling
depressed “often.” Even though youths may be aware of the grapevine news on
hundreds of students in school, only one‑third had ever heard of a peer
who discussed or tried suicide.When
asked directly “which of the following would make you feel better about
yourself,” teens did volunteer some shortcomings:half wanted better grades, a third wanted to look better and to
get along better with their parents.Imagine in all cases what 40 year-old adults might answer to the above questions,
if they did so truthfully.

USA Weekend would have to bend its poll
results completely out of shape to present a negative image of youths. Warp it
did.Here is how it headlined the
findings: “Teens tackle their identity crisis... teens are riddled with self‑doubt
about everything from their looks to their relationships with adults...Looks
are key... Teens find lots of imperfections... Depression is common... Families
aren't communicating...”Ironically,
the most abruptly negative response by teens was about grownups, when asked,
“do you think adults generally value your opinions?” Thirty‑six percent
said “no.”That percentage probably
rose after they saw how the newspaper relentlessly negativized their
overwhelmingly positive poll responses.

This result is consistent with other polls as well. The
April 1998 New York Times/CBS News
poll of 1,000 youths ages 13‑17 (supposedly the most rebellious age)
found 97% got along with their parents ‑‑ 51% “very well” and 46%
“fairly well.”It is doubtful that any
other kind of family relationship would produce such a positive response.

Naturally, the press, given a generally upbeat poll of
teens, accentuated the negative.The Times' story's lead sentence, on page 1,
read: “They carry beepers, prefer permanent tattoos to body piercing and are as
likely to take lessons in shooting guns as they are to play musical
instruments.”Whad did the poll really
find? That 18% of teens carry pagers, 5% have tattoos, 4% have body piercings,
and 31% took shooting lessons at some time in their lives ‑‑hardly strange, since the poll found 38% of
their parents owned guns.

The most comprehensive survey of youth attitudes and
behaviors, the 2000 Monitoring the Future
survey, consumes dozens of pages. It, too, asked 2,200 high school seniors to
rate “the way you get along with your parents.” Seventy percent were favorable,
including one in four who said “completely satisfied.”Fifteen percent were neutral, 16% were
negative‑‑and only 5% “completely dissatisfied.” (Spouses should
rate each other so positively.)

Ask to rate themselves, three‑fourths of the teens
had a good self‑image (33% thought themselves nearly perfect), 16% were
neutral, and 11% unfavorable. As for their supposedly mean, backstabbing,
gossiping teenage friends, 87% of the boys and 84% of the girls said they were
satisfied (41% were completely satisfied) with their friendships and the people
they spend time with. Only 5% were dissatisfied in any way, and only 1% to 2%
were completely dissatisfied. Their friends, in fact, were the aspect of life
teens rated most favorably.

Also interesting, teens were positive about their
educational experiences (two-thirds rated it positively, one-fifth neutrally,
and 16% unfavorably). That may be dismaying to those who wish teens were more
critical of their schooling. The Monitoring
survey also disputed the image portrayed in a rash of liberal books of the
obsessively materialistic adolescent envious of peers’ consumer possessions.
Three-fourth of teens were satisfied with their standard of living, housing,
car, furniture, recreation, and other possessions; only 11% were dissatisfied;
15% didn’t have an opinion.

Recent
polls have confirmed these findings. The Horatio Alger Association’s “The State
of Our Nation's Youth” survey, of 1,055 high school students released on August
5, 2003, found three-fourths saying they get along very well or even extremely
well with their parents or guardians, one-fifth termed the relationship “just
OK;” only 3% say they don’t get along with their parents. Fewer than one in 10
reported pressure to try drugs or have sex.

So, in self portrait, high schoolers are not miserable,
obsessed with self doubt, backstabbed by their friends, hostile to parents,
pressured by evil peers, or caught up in runaway consumerism. We may find
teens’ optimism and self-confidence unrealistically bubbly, but this is not an
alienated, miserable generation. The question is: why are adults, including
experts, so adamant about trying to make young people appear troubled--even to
the point of portraying depression and suicide as normative to adolescents?

One answer is financial self-interest: there is vast profit
in treating troubled teens, and therefore great incentive to expand the market
to an ever-growing number of adolescents.

The old
adolescent “diseases”

On April 21, 1896, Sigmund Freud made one of psychiatry’s
most startling and incisive addresses to the Society for Psychiatry and
Neurology in Vienna. Titled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” misbehaviors which
might be called “adolescent acting out” today, the address concerned Freud’s
conclusions from case studies of dozens of male and female patients:

I therefore put forward the
thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria, there are one or more
occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the
earliest years of childhood... In the first group it is a question of assaults--of
single, or at any rate isolated, instances of abuse, mostly practised on female
children, by adults who were strangers... The second group consists of the much
more numerous cases in which some adult looking after the child--a nursery maid
or governess or tutor or, unhappily all too often, a close relative--has
initiated the child into sexual intercourse and maintained a regular love
relationship with it... which has often lasted for years. The third group,
finally, contains child-relationships proper--sexual relations between two
children of different sexes, mostly a brother and sister... In most of my cases
I found that two or more of these aetiologies were in operation together; in a
few instances, the accumulation of sexual experiences coming from different
quarters was truly amazing.

...I am inclined to suppose that
children cannot find their way to acts of sexual aggression unless they have
been seduced previously. The foundation for a neurosis would accordingly always
be laid in childhood by adults... All of these grotesque and yet tragic
incongruities reveal themselves as stamped upon the later development of the
individual and of his neurosis, in countless permanent effects... the fit of
crying, the outburst of despair or attempt at suicide... behind all of which
there lies in addition the memory of a serious slight in childhood which has
never been overcome (Masson 1985, pp. 271, 276, 277, 284, 286).

Freud’s electrifying finding
was that abuses in childhood, which he bluntly termed “rape” and “assault,”
underlay most of what psychiatrists had been calling mental illness, especially
in children and adolescents. Freud’s brilliant exposition of his “seduction
theory” detailed all of the features of child sexual abuse now known to be
common (some 125,000 children are confirmed victims of family members every
year in the U.S.), especially the “neuroses of defense” which children employed
to deal with brutal exploitations. These included many behaviors--depression,
self-harm, anger displays, aggression and criminal behavior, paranoia, and more
serious psychoses--which had been, and are today, classed as mental diseases. A
century later, as will be discussed below, leading experts on teenage “conduct
disorder” would point out that conduct-disordered youths and abused youths were
one and the same.

Freud called for “a psychology of a kind for which
philosophers have done little to prepare the way for us” to treat neuroses of
defense, or later disturbances caused by violent and sexual abuse of children.
As we know, that was not what psychoanalysis turned out to be. In the face of
bitter denunciations by psychiatric colleagues and threats to end his career,
Freud revised his theory into a safer mode that held that children merely fantasized sexual experiences with
adults (especially the opposite-sex parent), the Oedipal and Electra complexes
of which became the foundation of psychoanalysis.

Freud’s capitulation, under intense pressure, exonerated
adult abusers and returned responsibility for mental disorder back to the
fantasizing young person, whose troubles were seen as the result of
developmental turmoil. As such, the adolescent rather than the maltreatments
and conditions with which he or she lived became the focus of the emerging
field of adolescent psychology.

Efforts to describe behaviorally disordered youth
according to objective criteria were pioneered by American criminologist
Richard Jenkins and colleagues in the 1940s, who classified three types of
delinquents:socialized, unsocialized
aggressive, and overinhibited.These
descriptors were based on manifest behaviors:aggressive stealing, running away, cruelty, and obscenity.Clinician factors included emotional
immaturity, overdependence, and vengefulness. In other words, disordered kids
had bad attitudes that explained why they acted badly.

The later definition of adolescent disorders found in
psychiatric codifications continued Jenkin’s “bad attitude” framework, “with
its aggressive‑nonaggressive and socialized‑unsocialized subtypes
and its minimizing of neuropsychiatric factors” and “is a direct
descendent" of his earlier models (Lewis, Lewis, Unger, and Goldman, 1984,
p. 514).These behavior‑driven
models are strongly influenced in practice by a youth's response, and level of
aggressivity in responding, to adult authority and can be distinguished, though
weakly, by testing (Matson and Nieminen, 1987). Thus, the manifest‑behavior
factors so categorized may ignore the types of traits relating to neurological,
and familial and environmental, patterns (Lewis et al, 1984).

The new
“adolescent diseases”

Nowadays, Dennis
the Menace would be on Ritalin, Charlie Brown on Prozac.

-Strauss & Howe, Millennials Rising, 2000, p. 154

In the last three decades, millions of children and youth
have been diagnosed, treated, and even institutionalized under new mental
disorder criteria that barely existed in the past. Several investigations, by
the American Psychological Association, American Medical Association, Blue
Cross, and Congressional committees have found gigantic increases in the
numbers of adolescents diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication, and a
six-fold increase in teenagers committed to psychiatric hospitals from the
1970s to the 1980s.

While various, vague and unofficial diagnoses such as
“adolescent adjustment disorder” surface now and then, three principle
psychiatric disorders of childhood and adolescence are listed by the American
Psychiatric Association (not affiliated with the Psychological Association) in
its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV), under
Pervasive Development Disorder. These are Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity
Disorder (abbreviated ADHD; without hyperactivity, ADD), Oppositional Defiant
Disorder (ODD), and Conduct Disorder (CD).

ADHD, The DSM-IV lists the
criteria for diagnosing the four subtypes of ADHD (see box). What does ADHD
look like in practice? The National Institute of Mental Health says:

They may be unable to sit still,
plan ahead, finish tasks, or be fully aware of what's going on around them. To
their family, classmates or coworkers, they seem to exist in a whirlwind of
disorganized or frenzied activity. Unexpectedly--on some days and in some
situations--they seem fine, often leading others to think the person with ADHD can
actually control these behaviors. As a result, the disorder can mar the
person's relationships with others in addition to disrupting their daily life,
consuming energy, and diminishing self-esteem.

ADHD, once called hyperkinesis
or minimal brain dysfunction, is one of the most common mental disorders among
children. It affects 3 to 5 percent of all children, perhaps as many as 2
million American children. Two to three times more boys than girls are
affected. On the average, at least one child in every classroom in the United
States needs help for the disorder. ADHD often continues into adolescence and
adulthood, and can cause a lifetime of frustrated dreams and emotional pain.

299.80. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Persisting for at least 6 months
to a degree that is maladaptive and immature, the patient has either
inattention or hyperactivity-impulsivity (or both) as shown by:

INATTENTION. At least 6 of the
following often apply:

·Fails to pay close attention to details or makes
careless errors in schoolwork, work or other activities

·Has trouble keeping attention on tasks or play

·Doesn't appear to listen when being told something

·Neither follows through on instructions nor completes
chores, schoolwork, or jobs (not due to oppositional behavior or failure to
understand)

·Inappropriately runs or climbs (in adolescents or
adults, the may be only a subjective feeling of restlessness)

·Has trouble quietly playing or engaging in leisure
activity

·Appears driven or "on the go"

·Talks excessively

Impulsivity:

·Answers questions before they have been completely
asked

·Has trouble or awaiting turn

·Interrupts or intrudes on others

·Begins before age 7.

Criteria:

·Symptoms must be present in at least 2 types of
situations, such as school, work, home.

·The disorder impairs school, social or occupational
functioning.

·The symptoms do not occur solely during a Pervasive
Developmental Disorder or any psychotic disorder including Schizophrenia.

·The symptoms are not explained better by a Mood,
Anxiety, Dissociative or Personality Disorder.

Specify "In Partial
Remission" for patients (especially adults or adolescents) whose current
symptoms do not fulfill the criteria.

For example:

Mark, age 14, has
more energy than most boys his age. Starting at age 3, he was a human tornado,
dashing around and disrupting everything in his path. At home, he darted from
one activity to the next, leaving a trail of toys behind him. At meals, he upset
dishes and chattered nonstop. He was reckless and impulsive, running into the
street with oncoming cars, no matter how many times his mother explained the
danger or scolded him. On the playground, he seemed no wilder than the other
kids. But his tendency to overreact--like socking playmates simply for bumping
into him--had already gotten him into trouble several times. His parents didn't
know what to do. Mark's doting grandparents reassured them, "Boys will be
boys. Don't worry, he’ll grow out of it." But he didn’t.

The NIMH admits ADHD behaviors may not always
originate with the youth:

The fact is, many things can
produce these behaviors. Anything from chronic fear to mild seizures can make a
child seem overactive, quarrelsome, impulsive, or inattentive. For example, a
formerly cooperative child who becomes overactive and easily distracted after a
parent's death is dealing with an emotional problem, not ADHD. So can living
with family members who are physically abusive or addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Can you imagine a child trying to focus on a math lesson when his or her safety
and well-being are in danger each day? Such children are showing the effects of
other problems, not ADHD.

In other children, ADHD-like
behaviors may be their response to a defeating classroom situation. Perhaps the
child has a learning disability and is not developmentally ready to learn to
read and write at the time these are taught. Or maybe the work is too hard or
too easy, leaving the child frustrated or bored.

...Research shows that a
mother's use of cigarettes, alcohol, or other drugs during pregnancy may have
damaging effects on the unborn child. It appears that alcohol and the nicotine
in cigarettes may distort developing nerve cells. Other research shows that
attention disorders tend to run in families, so there are likely to be genetic
influences. Children who have ADHD usually have at least one close relative who
also has ADHD.

And
at least one-third of all fathers who had ADHD in their youth bear children who
have ADHD. Even more convincing: the majority of identical twins share the
trait. At the National Institutes of Health, researchers are also on the trail
of a gene that may be involved in transmitting ADHD in a small number of
families with a genetic thyroid disorder.

Then, having warned that other things such as family
disruption, parental addiction, violent homes, and bad schools may cause youths
to express what appear to be ADHD symptoms, NIMH then turns around and advises
parents and other adults to ignore them--lest
they feel guilty--and focus on getting “the right help” to treat the child:

What Causes ADHD?
Understandably, one of the first questions parents ask when they learn their
child has an attention disorder is "Why? What went wrong?" Health
professionals stress that since no one knows what causes ADHD, it
doesn't help parents to look backward to search for possible reasons. There are
too many possibilities to pin down the cause with certainty. It is far more
important for the family to move forward in finding ways to get the right help.

Scientists, however, do need to
study causes in an effort to identify better ways to treat, and perhaps some
day, prevent ADHD. They are finding more and more evidence that ADHD does not
stem from home environment, but from biological causes. When you think about
it, there is no clear relationship between home life and ADHD. Not all children
from unstable or dysfunctional homes have ADHD. And not all children with ADHD
come from dysfunctional families. Knowing this can remove a huge burden of
guilt from parents who might blame themselves for their child's behavior.

But there is help...and hope. In
the last decade, scientists have learned much about the course of the disorder
and are now able to identify and treat children, adolescents, and adults who
have it. A variety of medications, behavior-changing therapies, and educational
options are already available to help people with ADHD focus their attention,
build self-esteem, and function in new ways (emphasis added).

It is strange advice that holds the causes of a
disease are unimportant. Or to assert that scientists don’t know what does
cause ADHD, but they do know what doesn’t
cause it--the home, the school, or society. The evidence NIMH cites to back
these conclusions isn’t very logical--true, not all youths from dysfunctional homes get ADHD, and not all youths with ADHD come from troubled
environments. (That is like saying: unprotected sex doesn’t cause HIV
infection. After all, not all people who have unprotected sex get HIV, and not
all people with HIV got it from unprotected sex.)

And
there’s something even more peculiar about ADHD:

One of the most exasperating and
frustrating features of ADD, and one reason it has been so difficult to
diagnose, is the inconsistency of its symptoms. A boy may be a terror in the
classroom but no trouble on the playground; his homework is excellent one week
and totally neglected the next. Children with ADD can often concentrate
effectively when they are intensely interested in something, and they often
behave better in small groups or situations with few distractions...

It is often difficult for a
doctor or mental health professional to diagnose the disorder in an office
consultation and even laboratory tests of attention and impulsiveness...
because the symptoms often disappear when the child is with another person who
is scrutinizing him closely as he confronts a novel situation or performs an
interesting task.

Aside from the fact that ADHD must not be that
exasperating and frustrating to diagnose, given the 4 million children, youths,
and a smaller number of adults medicated for it, this is puzzling. If ADHD
really is a biological brain disorder or genetic condition unrelated to
environmental factors such as home or classroom or the behavior of adults
around the child, why does it change so radically--even to the point of
disappearing altogether--when the environment
(including the adults at hand) changes? After all, true biological or genetic
disorders such as Tourette’s or Down Syndrome may change a bit from time to
time or environ to environ but remain clearly evident no matter where the child
is.

Further,
if ADHD is a “natural” brain deficiency that occurs across diverse social
environments, why is it diagnosed so much more in the United States than in
other comparably wealthy countries? The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
reports that “the U.S. produces and consumes five times more methylphenidate
(Ritalin) than the rest of the world combined” (Breggin 1998, p. 184). Roughly
90% of the entire world’s prescriptions for Ritalin, used to treat ADHD, are issued
in the U.S., in fact. Are kids’ brains just physiologically different here than
in the UK, Japan, or Italy?

ADD/ADHD typically are treated with stimulants, the most
common of which is Ritalin. Ritalin is classed with cocaine and amphetamine as
a psychostimulant; that is, it is a lower-dosage “kiddy speed.” Breggin, whose
psychiatric practice includes work with disordered children, reports the
effects of Ritalin:

Within
an hour after taking a single dose, any child will tend to become more
obedient, more narrow in his or her focus, more willing to concentrate on
humdrum tasks and instructions... At the doses usually prescribed by
physicians, children and adults alike are ‘spaced out,’ rendered less in touch
with their real feelings and hence more willing to concentrate on boring,
repetitive tasks (1998, p. 76).

These chemically-induced
traits are an advantage for schoolwork as well as at-home behavior improvement.
NIMH studies find Ritalin generally is effective in reducing “classroom
disturbance” and improving “compliance and sustained attention” in hyper
children and adolescents. Unfortunately, NIMH continues, the drug is “less
reliable in bringing about associated improvements, at least of an enduring
nature, in social-emotional and academic problems, such as anti-social
behavior, poor peer and teacher relationships, and school failure” (Breggin
& Breggin 1998, p. 77).

In short, Ritalin is a quick fix for disruptive youths.
It does not produce long-term or large-scale improvement in behavior or school
achievement. However, it does has some serious long-term side effects if taken
for many years, as often prescribed: tardive dyskinesia (permanent facial
tics), brain shrinkage, and greater risk of later abuse of cocaine and other
stimulant drugs. Whether drug abuse is a consequence of taking Ritalin (which
produces unpleasant withdrawal symptoms when not taken) or of the personality
that is treated for hyperactivity is in dispute.

Prescription
of Ritalin, Prozac, and other psychotropic drugs to persons under age 18 rose
from 1.1 million in 1985 to 3.7 million in 1994 (80% to 90% to boys), the American Medical Association News
reported in its February 23, 1998 issue. Ritalin prescriptions alone rose
8-fold from 1990 to 1999 and are now taken by an estimated 3 million youths.

Pharmaceutical
companies now publicly advertise ADHD-control drugs as promoting family harmony
and improved schoolwork. In the back-to-school themed Sunday newspaper inserts USA Weekend and Parade magazines of August 10, 2003, Shire pharmaceuticals promotes
ADDERALL XR, “a single-entity amphetamine product,” under a smiling child and
the adline, “Already Done with my Homework Dad!” The ad promises that ADDERALL
XR “works fast for the start of the school day--with or without food,” “offers
all-day ADHD symptom control,” and “helps improve academic performance.” The ad
admits that side effects include “decreased appetite, stomachache, difficulty
falling asleep, and “emotional lability” (and warns that “abuse of amphetamines
may lead to dependence”) but nonetheless urges parents to “talk to your doctor
today” to see if the drug “can add new meaning to your child’s life.” The same
magazines carried Lilly pharmaceuticals ads promoting its ADHD-control
non-stimulant drug Strattera under a logo resembling a highway sign carrying
the odd message, “Welcome to Ordinary.”

Peter
Breggin, MD, and Ginger Breggin, veterans in the war against psychiatric
drugging of children, argue in The War
against Children of Color that medicating children and youth will increase
further:

As a result of the efforts of
the psycho-pharmaceutical complex, including the drug companies and the federal
mental health establishment, many millions of children will be psychiatrically
diagnosed and medicated in the future. Prozac, with its stimulant qualities,
will probably prove itself able to space out and suppress children in much the
same fashion as Ritalin. We fear it will soon rival Ritalin as a widely used
agent for the biomedical suppression of children, especially older ones.

... Most children labeled DBD
[diagnosed with Disruptive Behavior Disorder], including ADHD, are in fact
suffering from ... conflict and stress due largely to the adult world around
them (1998, p. 103).

The
explosive growth in ADHD diagnoses in children and adolescents suspiciously
parallels the growth in family instability, parental addiction, crowded
classrooms, and intolerance for nonconformity in youths over the last couple of
decades. “Ironically,” generational historians Strauss & Howe observed,
“where young Boomers turned to drugs to prompt impulses and think outside the
box, today they turn to drugs to suppress their kids’ impulses and keep their
behavior inside the box” (2000, p. 154).

ODD and CD. While ADD and ADHD are
seen as biological deficiencies or as of undetermined cause, Oppositional
Defiant Disorder and the more serious Conduct Disorder are judged to result
from teenage attitude problems. The DSM-IV criteria for diagnosing ODD are shown
in the box.

Within
this definition, clinicians need not consider why a particular adolescent might be angry, argumentative, defiant,
annoying others, getting annoyed by others, blaming, resentful, spiteful,
vindictive, hostile, or negativistic. Nor are criteria such as “behavior occurs
more than expected for age and developmental level,” “clinically important
distress,” etc., specific; stamping one’s foot or yelling at adults a few times
in 6 months could be seen as establishing disorder. The DSM states that the
first three criteria for ODD are the most “discriminating”--that is, they lead
to the most diagnoses (Breggin & Breggin 1998, p. 69)--which reflects their
vaguely worded indicia of conflict with adults.

While ODD pathologizes youth who annoy adults, Conduct
Disorder contains serious behavior criteria. The criteria for CD mostly involve
law violations: assault, assault with a deadly weapon, robbery, sexual assault,
burglary, theft, vandalism, and arson. Thus, CD provides a method for wealthier
youth to be institutionalized rather than convicted through the criminal
justice system, and for the psychiatric industry to involve itself in treatment
of youths who might otherwise be incarcerated.

Five
to 15% of school-age children and youths--2 million to 6 million in all--have
ODD, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry estimates
(12/1999, http://www.aacap.org/publications/factsfam/72.htm). Not
surprisingly, girls

313.81 Oppositional Defiant Disorder

For at least 6 months, these
patients show defiant, hostile, negativistic behavior; 4 or more of the
following often apply:*

·Losing temper

·Arguing with adults

·Actively defying or refusing to carry out the rules or
requests of adults

·Deliberately doing things that annoy others

·Blaming others for own mistakes or misbehavior

·Being touchy or easily annoyed by others

·Being angry and resentful

·Being spiteful or vindictive

Criteria

·The symptoms cause clinically important distress or
impair work, school or social functioning.

·The symptoms do not occur in the course of a Mood or
Psychotic Disorder.

·The symptoms do not fulfill criteria for Conduct
Disorder.

·If older than age 18, the patient does not meet
criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder.

*Only score a criterion positive
if that behavior occurs more often than expected for age and developmental
level.

get tagged with ODD the most (older diagnostic
criteria for ODD included swearing, a disease sign only diagnosed in females.)
Researchers have suggested that ODD and CD are the same diagnosis divided by
gender (Reeves, Wherry, Elkind, and Zametkin, 1987), with higher standards (and
therefore weaker criteria for disease diagnosis) demanded of girls.

Interestingly,
past CD criteria such as “often lies,” “has run away from home at least twice,”
and “is often truant from school” have been refined. Diagnosers found many
youths have healthy reasons for lying and running away, and dropping out of
high school to work is often an economic necessity for poorer youth, not a
mental illness.

How
common is CD? The National Mental Health Association reports:

Conduct disorder is
more common among boys than girls, with studies indicating that the rate among
boys in the general population ranges from 6% to 16% while the rate
among girls ranges from 2% to 9%. Conduct disorder can have its onset early,
before age 10, or in adolescence. Children who display early-onset conduct
disorder are at greater risk for persistent difficulties, however, and they are
also more likely to have troubled peer relationships and academic problems.
Among both boys and girls, conduct disorder is one of the disorders most
frequently diagnosed in mental health settings (NMHA 2003, http://www.nmha.org/infoctr/factsheets/74.cfm).

These figures wouldmean that some 1.5 million to 5 million
teens suffer from CD, one-third of them girls.

312.8 Conduct Disorder

For 12 months or more the patient
has repeatedly violated rules, age-appropriate societal norms or the rights of
others. This is shown by 3 or more of the following, at least 1 of which has
occurred in the previous 6 months:

·Beginning by age twelve, frequently stayed out at night
against parents' wishes

·Runaway from parents overnight twice or more (once if
for an extended period)

·Frequent truancy before age 13

Criteria:

·These symptoms cause clinically important job, school
or social impairment.

·If older than age 18, the patient does not meet
criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Based on age of onset, specify:

·Childhood-Onset Type: at least one problem with conduct
before age 10

·Adolescent-Onset Type: no problems with conduct before
age 10

Specify Severity:

·Mild (both are required): There are few problems with
conduct more than are needed to make the diagnosis, and All of these problems
cause little harm to other people.

·Moderate. Number and effect of conduct problems is
between Mild and Severe.

·Severe (either or both of): Many more conduct symptoms
than are needed to make the diagnosis, or the conduct symptoms cause other
people considerable harm.

Adding up these
three major child-youth disorders, some 5 million to 15 million young people
would suffer from at least one--as many as one-third of the youth population.
It’s far fewer than that, however, since these diseases overlap--a kid who has
one usually has the other(s). Nine in 10 youth diagnosed with CD or ODD are
also diagnosed with other disorders, the most common of which is ADHD (NAMH
2003; Horne and Sayger 1990). If criteria common to other diagnoses were
eliminated, "the diagnosis of conduct disorder might even disappear,"
they contend ((Lewis et al 1984, p. 519).

In short, ADD/ADHD, ODD, and CD are largely
the same “disease.” They turn out to be more diagnosable from family and
economic conditions than from attitudes or behaviors presumed generic to
adolescence.

How do youths “catch” these “diseases of adolescence”?

While the criteria and disease model are based on the
assumption that the youth’s attitude and conduct are the sole factors in
diagnosing disorder, in practice the biggest single predictor of
child/adolescent ODD or CD diagnosis is a parent with anti‑social
personality disorder.Parental
rejection, inconsistent harsh discipline, absent father, large family size,
frequent shifting of parental figures, involvement with delinquent subgroup,
and parental alcohol or drug dependence are also associated with CD (American
Psychiatric Association, 1987). These factors, except for alcohol and drug
dependence, are found more often among lower socio‑economic groups (Horne
and Sayger, 1990). It’s not surprising, then, that diagnostic criteria for CD
and ODD, strictly applied, lead to disproportionately high levels of diagnosis
of low‑income, youth.

Prinz and Miller (1991) point out that lower
socioeconomic‑group families suffer from higher rates of parental
insularity, lack of economic and educational opportunity, and “child exposure
to criminal behavior”:

A
pattern of child behavior that is labeled as ‘aggressive’ may in some contexts
be interpreted as normative and adaptive. Children who live in an impoverished
neighborhoods replete with high crime and frequent challenges develop survival
skills to manage their environment. Verbal and physical aggression can be
necessary to survival and coping... and can be construed as normative in the
context of the peer culture of these youth (pp. 380‑381).

For middle-class cases,
Horne and Sayger’s clinical practice and review of numerous studies pinpoint
family environment as the chief variable:

The
common belief that oppositional or conduct problems on the part of a child or
young adolescent represent a form of rebellion against an otherwise well‑functioning
family does not hold up under scrutiny... aggression is generally not isolated
within one individual family member but is a family characteristic" (p.
89).

Horne and Sayger also
recommend combining “the separate tracks of conduct disorder research and child
abuse research” since “conduct‑disordered and abused
children may overlap or are often the same.”Thus “a systemic approach is recommended, namely, addressing
marital or spousal conflict, conflict with authorities or government agencies,
social isolation, and poverty” (pp. 25‑26). That is, screwed-up kids tend
to have screwed-up parents, and social conditions strongly affect whether
behaviors are seen as mental illness.

Lewis et al (1984) found that youth diagnosed with
conduct disorder had parents who themselves had been in a psychiatric hospital
(35% of the cases), in trouble with the law (18%), alcoholic (47%) or drug‑addicted
(30%), and one‑third of the youth had been physically abused. Horne and
Sayger note:

Many
children referred for treatment could not be differentiated from nonclinic
children based on their behaviors, but mothers perceived their children to be
deviant... If parents' perceptions of their children's behaviors are not always
accurate, it is possible that other variables, such as parental adjustment,
enter into the decision to label a child as deviant (1990, p. 34)

Of particular note, “90% of
the clinic children and 90% of the nonclinic children could be correctly
classified on the basis of the negativism and commanding behavior of the
parent” (p. 34).That is, CD‑diagnosed
children can be independently identified more accurately on the basis of their
parents' behaviors than on the basis of their own behaviors. Such parents have
more difficulty parenting and tend to be more critical of their children than
non-disordered parents.

The overwhelming majority of youth in inpatient
treatment, many having “serious problems with relationships with their
parents,” are admitted on the basis of evidence provided by their parents (Select Committee, 1985, p. 9).Yet “all major psychological theories of the
origins of conduct problems in children state that parent and family
functioning play key etiological roles” (Frick, Lahey, Loeber, Stouthamer‑Loeber,
Christ, and Hanson, 1992, p. 49). That is, conduct‑disordered children
overwhelmingly tend to have conduct‑ disordered parents, although the
latter may be defined under corresponding adult diagnoses such as anti‑social
personality disorder. The result is that children may be diagnosed as
disordered, and forcibly incarcerated for lengthy periods of time, based
largely or wholly on the statements of parents who themselves may be self‑serving
and even more disordered (Select Committee, 1985).

Breggin is more blunt. Disruptive disorders such as CD,
ODD, and ADHD amount to an “illness” that “consists of being disruptive to the
lives of adults,” he argues. “...It encompasses every kid in the world who’s
got any gumption. It’s as if the committee members (who designed the disease
criteria) added up all the things their own kids ever did to aggravate them and
took revenge” (Breggin & Breggin 1998, pp. 67, 68).

As with ADHD, ODD and CD often manifests itself only when
the youth is in certain environments or in the presence of certain people, the
American Psychiatric Association acknowledges. “Typically, symptoms of the
disorder are more evident in interaction with adults or peers whom the child
knows well,” the APA notes. “Thus, children with the disorder are likely to
show little or no signs of the disorder when examined clinically”
(American Psychiatric Association, 1987, p. 56). Mysteriously, the disease
“tends to go away during summer vacation” (Breggin & Breggin 1998, p. 71).

To what extent, then, do defiance of and hostility toward
adult authority among children raised in abusive conditions and/or violent
societies represent a maladaptive behavior pattern which by definition
characterizes a “disorder,” and to what extent are such responses adaptive and
even normative?Horne and Sayger (1990)
point out that running away from home, one criteria for CD, may, on the one
hand, represent a youth's “chronically maladaptive reaction;” on the other, it
may be “fundamentally healthy reaction to a pathological environment” (p. 138).
Critics charge that treatment facilities have been willing to take advantage
vague diagnostic criteria in the interests of profit and of assisting parents
who want their children removed from the family and treated because of their
children's inconvenient reactions to deficient parenting (Talan, 1988; Select
Committee, 1985).

Treating “diseases of adolescence”

Reviews are generally pessimistic regarding the
effectiveness of institutional, residential, educational, and pharmacological
(with the exception of lithium in cases of extreme outbursts) approaches to
treating CD and ODD (Carson and Butcher, 1992;Horne and Sayger, 1990).Institutional treatment is particularly criticized.An initial evaluation and two‑ to four‑year
follow‑up of 53 adolescent girls hospitalized for conduct disorder found
the outcomes “poor;6% had died a
violent death, the majority had dropped out of school, one‑third were
pregnant before the age of 17 yrs, half were re‑arrested, and many
suffered traumatic injuries” (Zoccolillo and Rogers, 1991, abstract, p. 973).

Text authors Carson and Butcher, in Abnormal Personality and Modern Life, report that inappropriate
treatment may worsen the anti‑social tendencies of CD‑diagnosed
youth:

By
and large, our society tends to take a punitive, rather than rehabilitative,
attitude toward an antisocial, aggressive youth.Thus, the emphasis is on punishment and on “teaching the child a
lesson.” Such “treatment,” however, appears to intensify rather than correct
the behavior. Where treatment is unsuccessful, the end product is likely to be
an antisocial personality with aggressive behavior (Carson & Butcher, 1992,
p. 545).

Because CD and ODD are
regarded, with few exceptions, as family‑based disorders, “therapy for
the conduct‑disordered child is likely to be ineffective unless some
means can be found for modifying the child's environment” (p. 544).The chief treatment recommended is
outpatient family therapy, emphasizing self‑control skills for the
parent(s) as the foundation of more effective discipline of children (Horne and
Sayger, 1990).

Minority youth predominate in the public and university
hospital and outpatient populations studied by researchers (see Frick et al,
1992; Atlas, DiScipio, Schwartz, and Sessoms, 1991; Lewis et al, 1984). Youth
in public programs are typically referred by courts, agencies, schools, and
other professional agencies (Horne and Sayger, 1990).Low‑income, primarily minority, youth are much more likely
than higher‑income youth to be declared delinquent and channeled into the
criminal justice system.In the 1980s,
for the first time, a majority of youth incarcerated in detention centers were
minority (Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, 1985).

While the greater diagnoses of ODD and CD among low‑income
youth holds true for public facilities, the diametric opposite is the case for
private hospitals which now handle a large majority of youth cases. Private‑facility
diagnoses of ODD and CD are much higher among middle and upper‑middle
income youth, and nearly all private placements are requested by parents rather
than by courts or agencies (Metz, 1991; Select Committee, 1985).

During the last 15 years, the constellation of CD, ODD,
and unspecified “transitional‑disorder” diagnoses is the key factor in
the rapid increase in adolescents committed to inpatient psychiatric
facilities.Juvenile admissions to a
sample of private psychiatric hospitals rose from 10,764 in 1980 to 48,375 in
1984 (Select Committee, 1985).The
number of youth confined in locked psychiatric wards rose from 6,452 in 1970 to
16,735 in 1980 and over 36,000 by 1986 (Talan, 1988).

The
trend toward greater psychiatric commitment for children and youth is
continuing, according to the latest (2002) National Association of Psychiatric
Health Services (successor to the National Association of Private Psychiatric
Hospitals):

Occupancy rates in
child/adolescent programs is at an alltime high, according to the NAPHS 2002
survey. The median occupancy rates within freestanding residential treatment
centers was 93.5 percent, and in hospital-based residential treatment centers
it was 83.9 percent. The NAPHS report states that these exceptionally high
occupancy rates, coupled with high admission rates, shows the critical need for
these services and their limited availability (2003, http://www.medaccessonline.com/articles/index.php?articleID=123&artcategoryID1=6).

But does it? Investigations by Blue Cross and other
insurers indicate “at least 50 percent of the admissions in this inpatient
psych and CD programs for juveniles were inappropriate.”Ira Schwartz, director of the University of
Minnesota's Center for the Study of Youth and Policy, stated the percentage was
“probably higher” (Select Committee, 1985).Studies by the Children's Defense Fund and American Psychological
Association have reached similar conclusions of substantial over‑commitment
of juvenile offenders based on vague diagnoses of ODD and CD (Metz, 1989;
Talan, 1988).

As Schwartz argues from extended study of juvenile
psychiatric admissions, the chief admitting criteria for private facilities is
not behavior, but insurance coverage or other evidence ability to pay (Select
Committee, 1985).A study of 2,000 California youth
psychiatric admissions showed youth with insurance were held in treatment twice
as long as uninsured youth (Metz, 1991).Further, youth in general were held in private treatment
facilities twice as long as adults with similar disorders despite the lack of
clinical evidence showing that “juveniles are twice as sick or that it takes
twice as long to cure them” (Select Committee, 1985, p. 29).Schwartz found that even though youths are
admitted for “far less serious problems” than are adults, children spend an
average of 55.8 days, and adolescents 48.6 days, in psychiatric wards, compared
to 25.5 days for adults (Talan, 1988, p. 1).

The growth in private psychiatric confinement of the
young parallels the decrease in youth in detention and public facilities.The number of non‑delinquent youth
held in detention facilities declined from 199,341 in 1969 to 22,833 in 1981,
while those in residential care declined from 155,905 to 131,419 (nearly all
are status offenders).“The intent of
the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act [of 1974] was not to have
status offenders removed from institutions in the justice system only to have
them incarcerated” in psychiatric facilities, Schwartz notes (Select Committee,
1985, p. 12).Only 10% of the mental
health facilities surveyed in 1973 were operated for profit;by 1977, that percentage had grown to 50%,
many involving multi‑facility chains (Select Committee, 1985).

By the 1990s, The entry of private, for‑profit
interests into youth imprisonment and treatment was booming, boasting a 45% annual growth rate over the last decade
into a $25 billion per year industry. One chain, Res‑Care, Inc., a
Kentucky‑based “entrant into the at‑risk field” (as Wall Street
puts it), generated $300 million in revenues in 1997 and added $95 million in
acquisitions in just the first three months of 1998.The chain employs 15,000 and cares for 17,000 clients.Securities analysts estimate "very
conservatively" that tougher anti‑drug and juvenile justice laws
will double the teenage lockup and non‑residential‑treatment
population from 103,000 in 1995 to 200,000 by 2004.

The high cost of caging prisoners and treating clients is
the big reason states want to privatize and private interests want to
economize.Earl Dunlap, of the National
Juvenile Detention Association, argues that only a tiny fraction of juvenile
offenders (about one‑fourth of one percent) require incarceration and
intensive supervision to protect public safety, while others are best treated
in smaller residential settings and local community programs.But, Youth
Today reported in 1998,

Such an approach flies in the face of the
economies of scale on which private operators depend.They usually prefer 500‑bed or more facilities that they
can build in out‑of‑the‑way sites where land and construction
costs are low, and unions are weak or non‑existent.

...Some authorities estimate
that over 20 years, a prison bed can cost about $1.25 million to maintain.If treatment and rehabilitation costs are
added, the amount could come to between $1.4 million and $1.6 million.For‑profit companies believe they can
turn a profit on those kind of numbers.Since they must shave costs to make money, they generally set out to
hire fewer employees and pay less in wages and benefits than state, federal or
non‑profit operations (Kearns 1998).

In the 1970s, sociologist
Robert Chauncey (1981) documented how fledgling federal drug and alcohol abuse
agencies fabricated a “teenage drinking” crisis to win attention and funding.
In the 1980s, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the financially struggling
psychiatric hospital industry whipped up a profitable “teen suicide” scare to
fill empty beds.It is easy to predict
that the 1990s expanding "at‑risk" industry's interest in mass
referrals, cost‑cutting, and warehousing in out‑of‑the‑way
facilities will predominate over community and individualized youth
treatment.Note that at the investment
costs projected above, each treatment center bed would have to generate $200
per day in revenue (that is, perpetually full capacity, no uninsured or poor
kids admitted) just to break even (Kearns 1998).

No wonder, then, that private psychiatric hospitals have
aggressively promoted greater treatment of youths through advertising and
marketing techniques. Private psychiatric hospitals all over the country have
displayed "sensationalistic and frightening ads" (Peele 1995, p. 125)
designed to convince parents that only inpatient treatment lies between their
disturbed child and suicide or violent death.Such ads have included scenes of teenagers putting guns to their heads
and parents visiting graveyards (Talan 1988;Peele 1995).However, neither
specific program studies nor outcome measures have substantiated the efficacy
of in‑patient treatment of these conditions (Horne and Sayger,
1990).Most private treatments rely on
ineffective behavior modification and drugs, not family‑based therapies
(Talan, 1988; Select Committee, 1985).

As Schwartz and committee members pointed out, a strong
publicity campaign by psychiatric interests has sought to portray large numbers
of juveniles as troubled and in need of treatment (Select Committee, 1985;
Peele, 1989).The American
Psychological Association task force found that increased advertising and
marketing “have led to the flux of adolescent admissions. ‘There were an awful
lot of empty beds out there before they started pushing for teenagers,’ Wilcox
said” (Talan, 1988, p. 1), referring to the American Psychological
Association’s study, led by Brian Wilcox, of the excess capacity of overbuilt
hospitals in the late 1970s.

The House select committee chairman, former Rep. George
Miller, D‑California, noted:

...
as it appears on the TV screen, the message is to bring your child in and we'll
take him.It's sort of like getting
your car repaired. No fuss, no muss. Show up at the care unit if you have
insurance or means to pay. It's almost as if the only diagnosis you need is
that the parent says, “I want my child placed here” (1985, p. 31).

Thus, “a growing number of
children are being placed in mental hospitals by frustrated parents who are
either unable or unwilling to cope with problems that have traditionally been
handled at home or by mental health professionals in their offices,” the
American Psychological Association task force found. In‑patient treatment
often costs $16,000 per month, or more. “You get some pretty rapid cures when
the insurance runs out,” noted Ira S. Lourie, M.D., director of child and
adolescent services at the National Institute of Mental Health (Talan, 1988, p.
1).

In response to criticisms, the National Association of
Private Psychiatric Hospitals defended its juvenile admissions and treatment
criteria (Select Committee, 1985).The
NAPPH reply did not directly address the specific abuses cited by critics, but
generally defended the association’s admissions criteria, “appropriate
assessment,” and “fully implemented quality assurance” (p. 78).The NAPPH statement contends that lax or
profiteering policies are not at fault:

Child and adolescent admissions
to psychiatric facilities are increasing because more of them are seriously
psychologically disturbed. The most recent President's Commission on Mental
Health Report (1979), estimated that 1.4 to 2.0 million adolescents have severe
psychological problems.More current
objective studies confirm these figures. Tragically, these severe psychological
problems often manifest themselves in suicide. An American teenager takes his
or her own life once [sic] every 90 minutes, and this year, an estimated two
million young people between 15 and 19 will attempt suicide.Suicide is now the third leading cause of
death among young Americans.

Fortunately, the American public
is becoming increasingly aware of the problem and increasingly accepting of the
need for appropriate treatment.Public
education campaigns have contributed to this heightened awareness of the
growing numbers of troubled youth (1985, pp. 78‑79).

Unfortunately, the NAPPH's
statement itself does not inspire confidence that the public campaign to
increase juvenile psychiatric admissions is based on calm, clinical evidence
rather than scare tactics and overblown promises. NAPPH's claim that a teenager
commits suicide “every 90 minutes” yields an annual toll of 5,840, three times the true annual toll (1,849
in 1985).The estimate that “two
million young people between 15 and 19 will attempt suicide” is four times that
predicted by even the highest survey estimate.NAPPH's claim that adolescent psychological problems “often manifest
themselves in suicide” is dubious: by their own figures, fewer than one in
1,000 adolescents with “severe psychological problems” commits suicide.
Adolescents are the least likely of any age group to commit suicide except pre‑teens,
and the much‑publicized increase in teen suicide is more likely to be an
artifact of changing death certification standards than real behavior change
(Gist & Welch, 1989).

Teen suicide: no epidemic

Legions
of commentators today continue to cite the psychiatric hospital industry’s 20
year-old, fraudulent consumer advertising figure of “5,000 teen suicides every
year.” Major mental health organizations feature blatantly wrong information,
all exaggerated. For a typical example, Kidshealth.org (2005) declares, “teen
suicide is becoming more common every year in the United States.” In fact,
rates have dropped dramatically in recent decades. And it gets loonier.
HealthyPlace (which calls itself “the largest consumer mental health site”)
wildly exaggerates teen suicide, estimating “300 to 400 teen suicides occur per
year in Los Angeles County” and that “available statistics may well
underestimate the... suicide epidemic among our young people.” Alternet, the
largest progressive online news service, holds the record. Its youth magazine, Wiretap, declared in December 2003 that
“every year, 10,000 Latino youth in California kill themselves.”

These are ridiculous statistics. In fact, the Los Angeles
County coroner reported 39 teen suicides in 2003, the most recent year
available, plus three more deaths for which intent was undetermined. In
California, around 50 Latino teens commit suicide every year, Center for Health
Statistics reports show. Alternet editor Tai Moses refused my repeated requests
to correct the gigantic error.

In
fact, a teen is 2.5 times more likely to have a suicidal parent than the other
way around, and the rate of teens killing themselves in suicides or self
destructive accidents has plummeted by 60% in California over the last 30
years. In 1970, a record 241 California teens committed suicide, and another
449 died in deaths ruled as “accidents” (self-inflicted poisonings, drug
overdoses, gunshot wounds, hangings, drownings, falls, cuttings, and
single-driver traffic crashes) indicating self-destructive intent--690 suicidal
deaths in all. In 2002, when 1.3 million more teens lived in California, there
were 143 teen suicides and 134 self-destructive “accidents”-- 277 deaths in
all. By rate, then, teen suicide and self-destructive accidents have declined
by 70% in California over the last three decades.

Among youths in other U.S. states, a similar though less
striking patterns appears: suicides and related accidents dropped from around
5,000 in 1970 to 3,000 in 2001 even as the teen population grew, a rate drop of
35%. Today’s youth, by a variety of measures, are much less self destructive
than those of past generations--especially in California.A number of interest
groups--psychologists, psychiatric hospitals, school authorities, health
lobbies--are treating this trend as terrible news.

But aren’t teen suicide “attempts” and gay teen suicide epidemic?

“For a number of years, researchers have known that
one-third of all teenagers who commit suicide are gay,” reports
HealthyPlace.com, a statistic the group calls “incredibly shocking” (Torres,
2005).Indeed, it would be, since, by
various estimates, gays comprise only 3% to 10% of the population.

Indeed,
a 1989 report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Task Force on
Youth Suicide estimated that gays comprise one-third of all youth suicides--a
rate three to 15 times higher than straight youth. This estimate was based on a
single study by San Francisco social worker Paul Gibson. His paper, “Gay Male
and Lesbian Youth Suicide,” found that 30% of 500 gay and lesbian youths he
interviewed at San Francisco foster care group homes, runaway shelters, and
other treatment centers had attempted suicide at least once. Based on his
estimate that 10% of teens are gay, Gibson judged that one-third of teen
suicides are by gay youth.

Gibson
admitted his report was not a research study. His sample was of particularly
troubled youth populations not representative of all teens. Actual suicide
figures did not substantiate his claims. From 1985 to 1989, San Francisco (home
to the state’s highest proportion of gay youth) recorded 17 teen suicides, a
rate substantially BELOW the state average.

In
1994, federal health authorities empaneled social analysts and mental health
advocates to examine the figures. “There is no population based evidence that
sexual orientation and suicidology are linked in some direct or indirect
manner,” they concluded (see Teens at Risk, 2005).

Similarly,
Peter Muehrer, chief of the Youth Mental Health program in the Prevention and
Behavioral Medicine Research Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health,
found the research studies most often cited to support a link between sexual
orientation and suicide are “limited in both quantity and quality... there is
no scientific evidence to support this (30%) figure.” In fact, “only two
relatively recent community-based original research studies have examined the
sexual orientation of individuals who completed suicide. Both found that
between 2.5% and 5% of the suicides in their overall samples were by people
believed to be gay.” Although a far cry from one-third, this lower estimate
must be considered a minimum, since “it is not possible to accurately compare
suicide attempt rates between gay and lesbian youth and non-gay youth in the
general population” (Rios, 1997).

The most impressive studies challenging the claim that
gay youth kill themselves in large numbers are by staunchly pro-gay
psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams of Cornell University, published in the
December, 2001, Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology. Savin-Williams notes that Gibson’s study exaggerated
homosexual teen suicide because it focused only on the most troubled teens.

Savin-Williams (2001) surveyed a more representative
sample of 349 students, ages 17 to 25. He found that over half of their
reported “suicide attempts” actually amounted to just “thinking about it”
rather than actually attempting it. A second survey of 266 college men and
women found that teens who think they are homosexuals were not much more likely
to have attempted suicide than straight students. Homosexual students were more
likely to have reported “attempts,” but these turned out just to be “thinking”
about suicide as well.

When
I solicit a broad spectrum of youths with same sex attractions, and not only
those who openly identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual while in high school,
and asked in-depth questions about their suicide history, I found statistically
no difference in the suicide attempt rate based on sexual attractions. Although
same-sex attracted youths initially reported a higher rate of suicide attempts,
on further probing this sexual attraction disappeared (Savin-Williams, 2001).

The activist homosexual
rights group Human Rights Campaign spokesman David Smith admitted that the
claim that gay teens kill themselves at vastly higher rates is probably wrong.
Nevertheless, he told USA Today, “Nobody disputes the fact being gay or lesbian
in high school is not a very pleasant experience. The core problem is prejudice
and harassment that goes unchecked in school settings. School officials take no
action. We need to address that problem head-on” (Teens at Risk, 2005; Rios,
1997).

Nor is there evidence that more teenagers are “seriously
psychologically disturbed” today;baseline data is not available to make such a claim (Goleman,
1989).“There is no great reason to
believe that adolescents have more serious problems today than they once did,”
Wilcox of the American Psychological Association task force concluded (Talan,
1988). The rate of admissions of adolescents diagnosed with serious mental
disorders‑‑schizophrenia and manic depression‑‑has
remained stable. Further, the massive growth in psychiatric commitments of
California teenagers beginning in the 1980s occurred after teen suicide and
related self-inflicted deaths had been declining
rapidly for more than a decade and is therefore not explained by rising
adolescent self-destruction. Rather, the recent increase in juvenile
psychiatric commitments is not due to serious mental troubles, but rather
“minor and family problems” often diagnosed as conduct disorder or other vague
disorders, Schwartz noted (Talan, 1988).

Private hospital spokespersons, such as Dr. Frank
Rafferty, vice president for medical affairs of the Health Care International
psychiatric hospital chain, argue that such “minor problems” as running away,
truancy, or stealing are in reality “extreme behaviors... a sign of serious
mental illness” which “can require hospitalization” (Talan, 1988, p. 1).Yet professional studies typically conclude
that most childhood disorders cure themselves.

An example from a New
York Times story illustrates the “headline hype” versus research
reality:“As many as one in five
children suffer from psychiatric problems serious enough to impair their lives
in some way, according to the surprising findings of several new surveys of the
mental health of children,” the article began. However, details of the surveys
noted that 20% of all 10‑year‑old boys display CD (declining to 7%
by age 17), as do 10% of all 15‑year‑old girls (declining to 1% by
age 17).

What is called “conduct disorder” was “found to cool
spontaneously,” the studies found. Reports the National Mental Health
Association (2003): “Research has shown that most children and adolescents with
conduct disorder do not grow up to have behavioral problems or problems with
the law as adults; most of these youth do well as adults, both socially and
occupationally” (http://www.nmha.org/infoctr/factsheets/74.cfm).

Controversy exists within psychiatric professions about
labeling “delinquent or defiant children” as psychologically disordered. “While
many emotionally disturbed adults had history of childhood disturbances, there
are also many children with these problems who go on to be well‑adjusted
adults,” Duke University Medical Center psychiatric epidemiologist Elizabeth
Costello said.“...Conduct problems are
counted as psychiatric in the United States, but that is not the case in
Europe, England, or even Canada” (Goleman, 1989, pp. C1, C9).

Eating disorders:Too fat or
too thin?

In
1993, Gloria Steinem’s book Revolution
from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Little, Brown) stated that “in this
country alone … about 150,000 females die of anorexia each year.” The same
figure appeared in the earlier, best-seller by Naiomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are
Used Against Women (Perennial, reissued 2002), which compared eating
disorder deaths to a holocaust. The number also appears in the women’s issues
textbook, The Knowledge Explosion:
Generations of Feminist Scholarship (Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender,
Teachers’ College Press, 1992). The figure received its widest publicity when
syndicated columnist Ann Landers repeated it in an April 1992 column: “Every
year, 150,000 American women die from complications associated with anorexia
and bulimia.” The original source appears to be the earlier editions of Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia
Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Vintage Books, reissued 2000) by Joan
Brumberg, an historian and former director of women’s studies at Cornell
University. Brumberg attributed the figure to the American Anorexia and Bulimia
Association.

But
the association said it was misquoted; it had referred to 150,000 to 200,000 sufferers (not deaths) from anorexia
nervosa (see Best 2001). In fact, the National Center for Health Statistics
lists just 8,000 deaths a year from all
causes, cancer to car wrecks among women ages 15-24 (the age thought most
susceptible to eating disorders)! In California, eating disorders (including
anorexia, bulimia, and all others) directly cause about 75 deaths a year and
are implicated as contributing factors in another 25. Of these 100 or so annual
eating-disorder fatalities, 90% are self-starvation deaths in the elderly;
fewer than 5% occur in women under age 30. In 2000, 2001, and 2002, California
medical examiners did not attribute a single teenage death, directly or
indirectly, to anorexia, bulimia, or any other eating disorder.

That
the “150,000 deaths” figure could gain widespread credibility among sensible
scholars, authors, and media figures, and go unchallenged for more than a
decade, shows how vulnerable Americans across the board remain to even the most
obviously and wildly exaggerated claims about disorders afflicting the young.
Clearly, there are political purposes at work. For perfectly good reasons, many
Americans are concerned about our cultural favoritism for excessive thinness in
women. Dieting and eating disorders, even if rarely fatal except to the old,
are a serious and endemic problem afflicting most American women and fewer,
though growing, numbers of men.

The
issue is not that pathological thinness and eating disorders are trivial
matters; they cause great psychological distress and some health problems among
those who strive to achieve all-but-impossible body image goals. This striving
occurs among all ages, from diet-pill popping high schoolers to liposucked
middle-agers. Drastic diets occur among old and young alike, and cosmetic
surgery to reduce weight is found particularly among women (and more and more
men) over age 35.

Rather,
the problem occurs when interest groups often tied to the “culture war” argue
the growth of some especially acute, widespread insanity in the young to
justify their political and social agendas. It is repeatedly stated as fact
that “media images” of feminine beauty cause young girls to become anorexic (to
restrict food intake and/or exercise heavily to the point of losing 25% of
normal body mass) and bulimic (a compulsive cylcle of binge eating and
purging). This image not only contributes to the misperception of young women
as uniquely psychologically impaired and unable to cope with their environments
without some kind of therapy, it contributes to misdiagnosis of the cause of
serious disorders that do exist.

In
fact, intensive studies have failed to tie serious eating disorders such as
anorexia and bulimia to media images or cultural preferences for thinness.
Sufferers from these diseases do not appear especially aware of or influenced
by such images; they are most strongly associated with “family dynamics,”
particularly rigidly controlling and ambivalent parents whose daughters attempt
to establish autonomy by drastic control of food intake (Berk 2002; Carson
& Butcher 2000). By trivializing such disorders as a cultural phenomenon
caused by teenage girls watching too much television or reading skinny-model
fashion magazines, political groups divert attention from these diseases’ real
causes.

Excessive
concern with achieving appearance ideals is a social problem afflicting
Americans in general, not simply the young. America’s striking inability to
design effective policies to reduce the nation’s difficult social problems
derives directly from authorities’ penchant for “juvenilizing” every issue.

Another
example, from the other end of the bathroom scale, is obesity. Americans are
the fattest of any people worldwide, with six in 10 adults overweight (Body
Mass Index of 25 to 29.9) and one-third clinically obese (BMI over 30, or 15%
or more heavier than maximum ideal body weight).

No sooner had America’s obesity epidemic gained
widespread publicity than authorities and the news media teamed up to blame it
on the young. America’s youth have indeed gotten fatter; 5% obese in 1970,
around 15% today. This level did not approach that of their parents’ Baby Boom
generation, whose obesity rate now averages 35% to 40%. Nevertheless, the
official focus was on the “alarming” increase in childhood obesity, with
identical features appearing in mainstream and alternative media outlets wth
titles like “Generation X-Large” and fat children were hauled on talk shows for
audiences to disapprove. School boards and consultants won quick popularity for
banning soft drinks and junk foods from schools (but not from their own office
snack bars), and culture warriors positioned themselves firmly on the side of
beleaguered parents against the fast-food, no-exercise lifestyles being sold to
kids by the fast-food industries and easy-life advertising (see Newman 2004).

The
emphasis on slimming down the young might not be a bad strategy if it had been
approached honestly. However, distortions predominated. For years, American
Baby Boomers boasted about our healthy switch to salad, aerobics, and granola,
away from booze, loungers, and Macsnacks. Then the Centers for Disease
Control’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey scales exposed our
monstrous phoniness: Boomers led America’s fat explosion. Our megabellies now
crash overloaded planes. Arenas widen seats to fit expanding whalebutts. The
Surgeon General’s obesity reports honestly admit that fat parents have fat
kids, but in popular media and forums, authorities take the easy way out: blame
the youngsters.

The
gutless wonder (among many) on fatness is the Hoover Institution’s widely
published scholar, Mary Eberstadt, who brands adult obesity a “socially
negligible” problem; chubby kids are the crisis. So much so, she advises in a
slap at feminists, that working moms should quit their jobs, stay home, and
slim down the kids. “Fat children tend to grow up into fat adults,” Eberstadt
insists--a message other health authorities echo in their crusades to ban sodas
and candy from schools (but not their own office junkfood bars). Adults, in
short, are too weak to curb our gluttonies.

The
convenient notion that grownups can keep swilling beer and driving to the
mailbox while forcing tofu diets and jogging regimens on kids not only
disregards how kids learn healthy habits, it grossly misrepresents how
America’s obesity epidemic ballooned and calls into sharp question the
ubiquitous assertion today that keeping kids skinny protects against future
fatness. In fact, today’s middle-aged hippos can’t blame their rotundity on
childhood pudginess. Only 5% of baby-boom children and teens growing up in the
1960s and ‘70s were obese:

Baby Boomers
lead America’s obesity epidemic..

Year
measured

Age1960-621976-801999-2000

6-114.2%6.5%15.3%

12-194.65.015.5

20-348.210.025.0

35-4413.415.729.6

45-5416.518.234.2

55-6417.218.738.2

65+17.617.836.4

Source: National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey, Centers for Disease Control (2004).

http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/trend/index.htm

From the above trends, one could reach a conclusion
exactly the opposite from the experts. It is not childhood, but middle-aged
obesity that is driving national girth expansion and needs to be scrutinized.

While,
in past generations, waistlines modestly broadened from teen years to middle
age, yet Boomer obesity exploded 600% as we aged from 20 to 50. It’s not really
surprising that fatter parents would raise fatter kids, beginning around 1980.
After all, five year-olds don’t pick their own meals; they mostly eat what
their parents put in front of them. Those long lines at the Krispy Kreme
Drive-thru and Grease Gourmet Buffet are multigenerational. Younger kids eat
and exercise, or fail to, like their parents.

The problem, then, isn’t fat kids aging into
fat adults, but fat adults raising fat kids in their image. Unfortunately,
American health and prevention authorities are downplaying grownup obesity and
focusing their alarms and crackdowns on children and teens--which, like past
crackdowns on youths, won’t work, because youth habits are founded in adult
habits. For both thinness and fatness, as well as a host of other social and
health crises, the popular politics and self-righteous “culture war” tone of
blaming younger generations has taken precedence over sound, though more
difficult, measures to address these problems in an integrated fashion.

Minnesota: does mass-treating teenagers work?

But, for all the dubiousness of diagnoses and fraudulent
advertising used to promote treatment, is it possible they played a role in the
declines in teenage problems over the last three decades documented here?
Correlation is not causation, however; the decline in youth problems occurred
across broad populations, not just those most heavily treated. Small-scale
studies have not found evidence that treatment for CD or ODD improves
individual adolescent behavior. A larger-scale example also suggests mass
psychiatric treatment of teens does not produce better youth at the societal
level, either.

In the early 1970s, Minnesota pioneered laws requiring
insurance companies to provide coverage for mental health and chemical
dependency treatment, creating “an enormous potential for the growth of these
programs as well as the potential for abuse” (Select Committee, 1985, p.
8).Results were soon forthcoming.In 1984, 3,047 juveniles, a number equal to
nearly 1% of the 13‑17 year‑olds in the state of Minnesota, were
admitted to psychiatric hospitals in the Minneapolis‑St. Paul area,
spending a total of 83,000 patient days in treatment.This admission level, more than triple the rate of 1976 and a 50%
rise from 1983, does not include all hospitals, nor juveniles admitted to substance
abuse or other facilities (Select Committee, 1985).Even allowing for out‑of‑state placements, Minnesota
youth were psychiatrically treated at levels three to five times higher than
youth elsewhere in the nation.

Minnesota thus provides a laboratory for the study of the
effectiveness of mass treatment of youth compared to measures treatment is
supposed to affect. If psychiatric treatment is accurately targeted and
effective in reducing youth disorders, we would expect to see significant
reductions in suicide, unwed birth, violent death, violent crime, and other
crime among Minnesota youth compared to youth nationally. These are the major
complications of conduct disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1987) and
the consequences private psychiatric treatment center advertising vigorously
claims to deter (Peele, 1995; Select Committee, 1985).

The treatment industry has based its advertising and
scientific justification for more juvenile admissions on claims that treatment
reduces just such problems as suicide, violence, substance abuse, and sexual
outcomes. These claims cannot be demonstrated for individual programs nor for
general outcome measures such as those of heavily treated populations such as
Minnesota youth. Nor can treatment automatically be blamed for the state’s poor
experience without more specific study.

Promoting adjustment to maladjustment?

The question becomes a familiar one in psychological
ethics: what right or obligation do psychological disciplines have to
“diagnose” and “treat” patient “diseases” which consist of reactions against
harsh environmental conditions of poverty, abuse, and anti‑social
behaviors imposed upon them by authorities? Are youths being served by
“treatment,” including mood-altering medication, which promotes or forces their
adaptation to detrimental environments?

For ODD and CD are not usually solely youthdiagnoses, but symptomatic of a
constellation of familial (and often social) breakdown:

When
we take a look at the underlying vulnerabilities, we are almost invariably
faced with such a variety of intrinsic problems (e.g., psychotic, organic,
psychoeducational) and such a dearth of external family and institutional
supports that we may wish that we had never looked so carefully at the
youngster in the first place (Lewis et al 1984, p. 518).

So we don’t look carefully. The earlier views
expressed by Lewis and other therapists that getting to the root of the youth’s
causes was the key to treatment has been supplanted by today’s view that making
the youth conform is all that matters. As NIMH advises, “it doesn't help
parents to look backward to search for possible reasons... It is far more
important for the family to move forward in finding ways to get the right
help,” mainly in the form of psychoactive medication.

For unlike their therapist forbears, but like other
professionals who deal with youths now, there is little interest today in “root
causes”--that is, why the youth is
“acting out” and “annoying adults.” The point is to get the youth to stop being annoying “by means of a
variety of medications, behavior-changing therapies, and educational options”
(NIMH 2003). As we’ll see, the increasing refusal of institutional systems to examine
their own behaviors, and the substitution of forcing youths to conform as the
first and only order of business, is not unique to adolescent psychology but
reflects larger modern trends toward insisting that youth problems are caused
solely by youths themselves.

Bachman JG,
Johnston LD, O’Malley PM (2002). Monitoring
the Future: Questionnaire Responses from the Nation’s High School Seniors,
2000. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

Berk L
(2002). Child Development, 6th ed.
Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Best J
(2001). Damned Lies and Statistics.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Breggin P.
& Breggin G. (1998). The War against
Children of Color. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

Carnegie
Council on Adolescent Development (1995). Great
Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century. New York: Carnegie
Corporation.